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COEffilGHT DEPOSm 



LETTERS 
TO TEACHERS 

AND OTHER PAPERS OF THE HOUR 



By 



HARTLEY BURR ALEXANDER 

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY 
.UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA' 



Incipit Vita Nova 



CHICAGO LONDON 

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY 

1919 






Copyright by 

The Open Court Publishing Company 

1919 



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To my sister 
CHARLOTTE 



PREFACE 

IT is, doubtless, needless to say that the papers 
here collected are frankly journalistic, frankly 
propaganda. They were written during war- 
time, and while directed to the internal condition 
rather than the external affairs of our nation, they 
are influenced and inspired by the omnipresent fact 
of the international catastrophe. The problem with 
which they deal is the problem of reconstruction 
where it is most fundamental, and that is in the 
education of the American citizen; for the economic 
and social difficulties which today we face can find 
no lasting solution except it be in a state of mind, a 
national state of mind, which shall unite our citizen- 
ship in a unified purpose ; and this it is the business 
of education to define and achieve. The issue is 
sufficiently important to demand journalism, to 
justify propaganda. 

Most of the papers here reprinted were originally 
addressed to the people of Nebraska, but they deal 
with problems which are local and national in the 
same sense, so that their particular context ought 
not to prevent their general consideration. The 
title series was first published in the Nebraska State 
Journal (Lincoln), April- July, 1918, under the 
heading, "Letters to Nebraska Teachers." Other 



PREFACE VI 



papers in the collection appeared in the Mid-West 
Quarterly, in School and Society, and in The 
Nation. The paper entitled "The Ballot" has not 
previously been published. 

Lincoln, Nebr., April 9, 1919. 



CONTENTS 

Page 
I LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

i Life's Adventure 3 

ii The School and the Commonwealth 13 

iii The School and the Community 23 

iv The Schoolyard 33 

V The Curriculum 45 

vi The Humanities 55 

vii History 65 

viii The Bible in the Schools 75 

ix Nature and Science 87 

X Crafts and Vocations 99 

xi The Life of Youth 109 

xii Poetry and Pageantry _ 117 

xiii The Age of Romance 127 

xiv The School System 137 

XV The Teacher's Profession 147 

xvi The Teacher's Life 157 

II FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 

169 

III COMMUNITY PAGEANTRY 

193 

IV EDUCATION IN TASTE 

205 

V EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY: 

i The Failure of the Intellectuals 227 

ii The Ballot 23^ 

iii Pro Fide 245 



I 

LETTERS TO TEACHERS 



LETTER I 
LIFE'S ADVENTURE 

I WHO write this am Nebraska born. Most of 
my education, too, was given me by Nebraska, 
where I attended grade and high schools and finally 
the state university, in which I have now passed ten 
years of my mature life as a teacher. The public 
schools of Nebraska, grade and high and collegiate, 
form a single system, having for their purpose the 
education of the up-growing citizens of the state. It 
is of these schools and of this education that I pro- 
pose to write, addressing the public school teachers 
of the state, the great majority of whom are, like 
myself, native born and educated in Nebraska; and 
I trust that what I shall have to say will be of in- 
terest, also, to teachers whose work falls in other 
parts of the nation, w^here the problems of life, and 
of education as a part of life, do not, it appears to 
me, radically differ from those which I perceive in 
my own environment. I shall hope also to reach 
citizens who are not teachers by profession; for I 
am sure that all good citizens realize that the object 
of public education is to so train its youth that they 
will live honorably and well, and make the com- 
monwealth pleasanter and more habitable for man- 

3 



4 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

kind; and I am sure that so great a concern as this 
cannot fail of their attention. In the long run, citi- 
zen and teacher and youth have one common aim — 
to make and keep human life wholesome and sane 
and in the highest sense happy. 

I should like to speak first of all of those things 
in Nebraska that I cherish. I have reached that 
age when a man begins to realize that memories 
are as rich in life's portion as are hopes, and that 
what is dear out of the past must color and warm 
all that is to be dear in the future. Life is, to be 
sure, a kind of adventure, and our best prayer for 
each is that his life may prove to be a beautiful 
adventure ; yet we should not forget that this adven- 
ture of living has an end, even as it had a beginning, 
and that the value of a life is to be found in what it 
is as a whole, not merely in the expectations and 
desires which happen to engross its present hours. 
As men grow into maturity they begin to realize 
that the true gold which they have amassed is their 
treasured memories; and realizing this they be- 
come the more solicitous for their children, know- 
ing that the only fortune which no change can take 
from their heirs will be the memories that live on 
into the after years. 

The main part of the years of my boyhood were 
spent in a country village of southeastern Nebraska 
— just such a village as scores of others which today 
dot the map of the state. My earliest recollection 
of it is of a place bare and windswept, open alike 



LIFE'S ADVENTURE 5 

to the unrelenting suns of summer and the unre- 
mitting gales of winter; and there seemed (so my 
memory reports) something quite audacious in the 
group of crude frame buildings, standing unrelieved 
and nude in the midst of miles of almost treeless 
prairie. Today, this village is nearly hidden in 
summertime by the luxuriant green of its leafage, 
and the country round about is one continuous 
chequer of hedgerow and field and grove; nor can 
winter at its whitest take away the impression of 
snug comfort that has changed the whole face of 
nature. 

It was with this change from a raw pioneer town 
to the snug trading hamlet of a well-seated farming 
community that I grew up; and the Nebraska I 
know best of all is, I suspect, the Nebraska of the 
transformation from virgin prairies into cultivated 
farms — a Nebraska of some hardships, but of a 
great adventure done once for all; for the prairies 
which I knew as a boy were just such as they had 
been, for century upon century, since the great ice 
had melted away to the north, leaving on them the 
strewn gravel in which I used to find onyx and 
agate; and the farms as they are now are surely 
much what will be through as many centuries more, 
perhaps, until a new age of ice comes again to 
drive away their summers. The transformation 
was surely a very wonderful period, and I am glad 
that I have lived in that good time. 

Of course I did not realize all this, as a boy — 



6 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

what boy could? But I felt its stir, none the less. 
There was always a thrill in seeing the prairie 
broken, the horses even in double team tugging and 
sweating, and the long ribbons of sod turning in 
neat parallels. There was beauty, too, in the fires 
that swept through the dried grass of autumns, 
tanged with danger, and illuminating the hills at 
night for miles around. Then there were tree- 
plantings and house-raisings and auctions and busy 
market days — all occasions when folk gathered to 
the enterprise with a hearty vacation spirit, natur- 
ally attractive to boys; while, from another angle, 
there were old-timers with stories of freighting days 
and Indian fights. Nor was the "wild west" so far 
remote; every year cowboy traders came through 
with droves of half-broken mustang and broncho 
ponies, and not a few exhibitions of hardy horse- 
manship; while hardly a season passed without at 
least one encampment of Indians journeying on 
their endless tribal visits from reservation to reser- 
vation. But most affecting of all to the imagination 
were the prairie-schooners of the new settlers — • 
streams of them, spring and autumn, drifting west- 
ward, westward, into their land of promise. 

With other boys I used to explore the country; 
wandering up and down the banks of the wooded 
Nemaha; playing at Indian with bows of ash, ar- 
rows of reed, and spears of dried sunflower stalks; 
searching for occasional arrowheads and flints in 
the gravel beds; or gathering treasures from the 



LIFE'S ADVENTURE 7 

limestone quarries, abundant with fossil relics of 
the time when as yet this land was not and where 
Nebraska is was the teeming life of old Devonian 
seas. With other boys, too, I went to the village 
schools — old-fashioned, I suspect the teachers of 
our day would call them, or perhaps old fogy; cer- 
tainly, as I recall, grammar and arithmetic were 
regarded by the pupils as the real tests of their 
mettle, while spelling-down appealed to our sporting 
instincts. I learned a trade, too, as did many of 
the others, and planned and hoped with them for the 
great day when — like the movers in the prairie 
schooners — I should set out to discover the wide 
world beyond the prairie horizon and make un- 
claimed lands my own. 

Most of the boys who were my companions grew 
up to fulfill their hope of adventuring out into un- 
tried frontiers or strange lands, and today they are 
scattered in many a far place. I, also, departed, 
and for a decade dwelt in distant cities; but unlike 
many, I returned again to my native soil, and with 
I believe a new veneration for what is beautiful in 
Nebraska. For I have discovered that those beauties 
which most endure in human experience are not 
to be found in the novel and spectacular moments 
of the traveler, but in familiar and intimate things, 
and especially in those impressions which come to 
childhood and youth, when the mind is eager with 
curiosity and fresh with hope. To me the prairies 
of Nebraska are wonderfully beautiful, with their 



8 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

broad curves and modulating distances. I love, too, 
the animation of the cornfields, stirred by cruising 
winds; the sudden thunderstorm with its avalanche 
of lightning and the impetuous rain sweeping up 
after the great billow of cloud is the very raiment 
of majesty; and I think I have never seen such stars 
as ours, over the whole dome of heaven, of a win- 
ter's night. Nor can I ever forget that once-seen 
sunset sky, gold and burnished copper from circum- 
ference to circumference, which will be for me for- 
ever the image of the sublimities of the judgment 
day. 

My eight-year-old, like his father, was born in 
Nebraska, and in the same city. It gives me a cer- 
tain satisfaction to recognize this continuity of gen- 
erations, and to hope that it may go on in the future. 
I hear his shout of joy at play; I watch him trudge 
off to school ; and I think of him — as I suppose other 
parents think of their children — as gathering day 
by day that store of vivid impressions which are 
one day to come home to him as a precious treasure. 
It is pleasant to know that a part of the kinship 
with his father which he will some time realize will 
be that deepest of all comradeships which rests upon 
a common understanding of the same earth and sky 
with all the companioning changes of nature. It 
is out of such common understanding that love of 
home and love of country grow to mean so much 
to men. 

Of course I recognize that the Nebraska he will 



LIFE'S ADVENTURE 9 

know cannot be quite the Nebraska that I have 
known. For instance, where I as a boy, was inter- 
ested in ponies and mover's wagons, he is interested 
in automobiles and railroad trains; and I have dis- 
covered from his chance comments that the school- 
room for him has a color and tone different from 
those which cling to mine out of the old days. But 
more than all, I am sure that he will never know 
the exuberance and adventurous hopefulness which 
belonged to the pioneer days, when everything was 
to be done, and nothing was complete, and the whole 
face of nature was to be changed to suit men's new 
needs. That was a great enterprise which our 
fathers took in hand; and they performed it well, 
and once for all ; so that what Nebraska now is many 
generations will continue to see it. Nor could so 
great a deed have been achieved without inspiration 
in the souls of them that did it, and a kind of glory 
enveloping their lives. 

* What will take its place — have you never asked 
the question — what will take the place of the great 
adventure of the pioneers, to put in the souls of their 
children the old fire and the old enthusiasm that 
seem so precious to us as we look back? It was 
good, we can see, for them to be building a pleas- 
ant habitation for their heirs in the land ; they lived 
creative lives, stalwart and honorable, but is it so 
good for their children's children? Are these simply 
to inhabit the pleasant house, making no addition? 
Could such a life be a good life, inheriting all, creat- 



10 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

ing nothing? Or are there still such tasks to per- 
form, here in Nebraska, as shall test the mettle of 
the best of them, and give them all that buoyancy 
of soul which comes but when life is touched with the 
noble generosity of fine deeds to do? To the minds 
of all citizens such questions must come at times; 
but most of all they will occur and recur to teachers 
and parents, for it is teachers and parents who most 
fully realize that the one true heritage which a pass- 
ing generation can leave to its youth is a noble task. 
I have no qualms as to this with respect to my 
boy. My life has been cast in a great generation; 
but his, if he be spared, will be lived in a greater. 
Its achievement will not, I believe, be of the char- 
acter of those which have made my generation 
great ; marvels of physical achievement, such as the 
mastery of earth and sea and air by machines, the 
uniting of the seas by great canals, the discovery 
of Earth's two poles, and here the transformation 
of the great North American wilderness into civ- 
ilized states, uniting in amity men of all nations. 
But the next generation will have set for it tasks 
more stupendous than these, pertaining not to me- 
chanical and physical but to human and spiritual 
problems. The most terrible of all wars began in 
1914 and at this writing is not yet ended. This war 
has shaken human civilization to its foundations ; it 
has destroyed cities and devastated nations; but of 
more lasting significance are the deeper destructions 
of men's political and economic institutions and the 



LIFE'S ADVENTURE 11 

more harrowing devastations of men's souls. The 
secret of sane living must be rediscovered by the 
next generation, the world must be reorganized for 
a better and purer and nobler race of men; nor is 
there a phase of social or intellectual life that will 
not have to be renewed and reillumined by the men 
and women of the future. 

I watch my son trudge off to school, here in Ne- 
braska, and I am glad in the hope that he may play 
a man's part in that great task. I have a feeling, no 
doubt partly a bias for my native soil, that the sons 
and daughters of this great west, so lately virgin 
sod and still shining with the generous glamour of 
the spirit of the pioneers, should be well qualified 
for a great part in the great task. I realize, of 
course, that this qualification cannot be merely one 
of natural advantages or of inherited spirit; that in 
addition there must be the soundest and most genu- 
ine education which state and parents can afford, 
or by thought and care find out. I am convinced, 
too, that our schools and the whole commonwealth 
whose ideals they reflect have not yet risen to the 
measure of this opportunity or of the hour and of 
the duty which is theirs. Further, I believe that 
the surest means of reaching not merely the schools, 
but even more the public of the commonwealth, 
who must be reached if a true conception of educa- 
tion is to be attained, is through the teachers in 
these schools — the teachers of Nebraska, of all 
America. Therefore I am addressing to them these 



12 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

letters in the hope that what I have to say may seem 
worth consideration and inspire discussion and lead 
— in some better form than I can suggest — to action. 
For it is to action that we are called; even as our 
fathers were called to the great task of redeeming 
a wilderness, even as our children must be called 
anew to regenerate the nations, so we, in our day, 
are summoned to prepare the way for them, train- 
ing their bodies and opening their minds to vision, 
— our part in the eternal deed of human progress, 
O Adventurers ! 



LETTER II 

THE SCHOOL AND THE COMMONWEALTH 

THE States of the American union have each 
their own sovereignty. No doubt the twentieth 
century American, with his strong sense of the cen- 
tral nation, has grown away from the intense state 
patriotism of the earlier years of the republic. To a 
considerable degree he has even lost his feeling for 
the federal nature of our constitution. Particularly 

in the newer commonwealths, with their migrant 
populations and uncertainty of tradition, it is, easy 
for the citizen to focus his attention upon the 
national aspects of his citizenship — upon the flag 
and the imperial grandeur of our domain and upon 
the high statecraft of Congress and the White 
House — rather than to permit it to become absorbed 
in the less showy manifestations of his local sov- 
ereignty. And yet each commonwealth of the 
United States is a sovereign, and exercises sovereign 
rights, and in a sovereign manner determines the 
destinies of its citizens. Nor is there another single 
feature in which this sovereignty is exerted with 
so much force and significance for human life as in 
the schools — those free public schools which are the 
mainstay of all free human society. Assuredly, in 

13 



14 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

the support of such an institution the citizen of any 
commonwealth may feel that he is furthering the 
ends of the truest statecraft and manifesting the 
most enduring patriotism. 

In democracies the sovereign is the people. But 
a people can be sovereign only when it understands 
the nature and duties of sovereignty. It is the first 
principle of public education that it shall secure 
this understanding; and the free schools of the 
commonwealth are, therefore, the final fortification 
of its democratic rights. The two great institutions 
upon which Americanism rests are the ballot and the 
public schools, and the latter are the true prepara- 
tion for the former. When, therefore, in the order- 
ing of American institutions, the organization and 
conduct of the schools are left in the hands of the 
several states, this is the truest recognition not only 
of their proper sovereignties, but also of the fact 
that the sovereign power of the nation as a w^hole 
is the creation and summation of these state sov- 
ereignties. It is also a pledge of confidence of the 
states in one another that each may be relied upon 
to broaden and preserve the conceptions of liberty 
and justice and human right which form the bond 
and cement of our national unity — and the proud soul 
of our Americanism. 

By far the largest single item in Nebraska's an- 
nual budget (and doubtless this is true of most of 
our commonwealths) is the educational expenditure. 
This is as it should be, but it should be so primarity 



THE SCHOOL AND THE COMMONWEALTH 15 

for the reason that the schools of Nebraska are the 
safeguards of her democratic institutions, and hence 
of the free Hfe of the whole community. The 
schools exist for the betterment of the life of the 
state as a whole, and therefore of the United States 
as a whole — this is the first principle upon which, 
in a truly American education, all other educational 
principles must rest. The tax which the school sys- 
tem imposes upon the community is justified by the 
returns which the schools make in the preservation 
of the community and in its .betterment, and by 
nothing else. In brief, the first aim of public edu- 
cation is to train qualified citizens. 

This principle must not be applied in a narrowly 
political sense, as teachers are sometimes inclined 
to apply it. It does not mean an intensive concen- 
tration upon, say, American history and civics, im- 
portant as these are. Rather, it means the cultiva- 
tion of a true liberalism as the core of all our school- 
ing — grade, high school, and college — and the dis- 
semination of this liberalism among the greatest 
possible number of our youth. Liberalism is the 
one essential qualification for the citizen of a democ- 
racy; and what we mean by democratic equality is 
the opportunity — nay, the duty — of every citizen 
to share in this essential. Free education must first 
of all be liberal education; that is the starting-point 
of our philosophy. 

In later letters (indeed, it shall be my central 
theme) I shall endeavor to explain in detail what I 



16 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

regard as the proper schooling of a democratic lib- 
eral. Here I shall but seek to give a broad con- 
ception of what qualities in the man a liberal educa- 
tion must cultivate. And these, I should say, are 
a love and understanding of truth and virtue and 
beauty. Love of truth means honesty with one's 
self as well as frankness with one's fellow — "to 
thine own self be true . . . thou canst not then 
be false to any man" — and it means this for the sake, 
most of all, of the great gain that comes from free 
human intercourse. The value of free speech and 
of the free press about which we say so much is 
directly dependent upon the honesty and truth-lov- 
ing spirit of society; without this spirt, there is no 
freedom. Love of virtue — the second quality 
named — means the power of self-control. The 
Greeks meant this when they made the first rules 
of conduct ''Know thyself" and ''Temperance in all 
things" ; for knowledge of self is the first step in 
self-control, just as temperance, self-restraint, is its 
achievement. Human conduct is ordered by two 
great forces, our instincts and our virtues; and if 
you will reflect upon the nature of the virtues (cour- 
age which overcomes fear, temperance which con- 
quers appetite, industry which outfaces sloth) you 
will perceive, I am sure, that the virtues are in the 
nature of curbs and reins upon the instincts; the 
instincts are given us by nature, it is the virtues 
that can be trained. Nor is self-control less essen- 
tiol to freedom and to a society of equals than is 



THE SCHOOL AND THE COMMONWEALTH 17 

love of truth; for it is the practice of a free society 
to be able to give as well as to take — to abide by 
the rule of the majority, for example, and take one's 
turn for the expression of opinion or the execution 
of a policy rather than to rush into revolution or 
tyranny. The third factor in a liberal education 
is love of beauty. This is not less essential to an 
enduring society than is either of the others; for 
love of beauty means an ability to idealize and to 
imagine better things, and hence to be inventive and 
creative, and therefore interested in the work which 
men find to do. Without this idealizing power men 
sink naturally back into an animal indifference to 
all save material comforts; they become swinish, and 
willing to fatten at any trough ; and for such a state 
of mind all democracy is illusion. Love of beauty 
is, in truth, the final and completed salvation of the 
state. 

Now there is one characteristic which these traits 
have in common, and it is the one characteristic 
which makes them truly liberal. Love of truth and 
love of virtue and love of beauty are all unselfish 
and impersonal. Not one of them is based upon 
self-seeking and self -gratification in any narrow 
mode. Indeed, they move in quite the opposite 
direction. Love of truth, for example, is closely 
allied to humility; it implies a willingness to be 
taught, and absence of that conceit which is the 
customary mark of ignorance. Love of virtue comes 
only from a self -under standing, and that means 



18 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

from a full appreciation of what temptation signifies 
in human life, and of human weaknesses, and es- 
pecially of one's own weaknesses. Love of beauty 
is most of all a native generosity of soul, implying 
sympathy and an ability to enter into other lives 
than one's own, under standingly and without envy. 
Thus each of the three means a kind of liberation 
from what is selfish and animal in one's nature and 
a willingness to find the good of life in what is uni- 
versal and humane. It is in such liberations that 
true liberalism is to be found, and especially the 
liberalism that makes possible democratic states; 
for it is in democracies, where men must get along 
together by mutual agreement and free self -surren- 
ders, that willingness to learn and understanding of 
men's weaknesses and a generous sympathy are 
most indispensable. 

There is a very important inference to be drawn 
from the nature of liberal education so defined — 
an inference thrice important in our own day when 
so much stress is laid upon what is called vocational 
training (and really is technical and mechanical 
training) . For clearly, if the end of free schools is 
primarily the liberal education of citizens who can, 
through understanding and love of it, preserve the 
state, it cannot be the first purpose of these schools 
to give the scholar training in particular crafts for 
the sake of his individual career. The vocation is 
something that pertains to the private rather than 
the public life of the man; it represents what he 



THE SCHOOL AND THE COMMONWEALTH 19 

does for himself or what his parents or family do 
for him rather than what the state should be called 
upon to do. There is, to be sure, a good coming to 
the state from the fact that it possesses citizens 
highly trained in special crafts; modern society is 
complex and cannot continue without specialists and 
technicians. But, on the other hand, a com- 
munity composed of men who are specialists and 
technicians without first being liberally trained citi- 
zens cannot continue as a democracy; inevitably it 
will develop into a society of classes, castes, unions, 
federations, mutually hostile and exclusive. Voca- 
tional education, by itself, is purely aristocratic. 
The first duty of a democracy is to remain a democ- 
racy; and the only schooling it can tolerate, there- 
fore, is one which first of all secures to all its citi- 
zens such a heart and constitution of liberalism as 
shall insure the maintenance of democratic free- 
dom amid all the complexities of technical human 
pursuits. This is a matter of huge importance, 
which no teacher (even of the most special subject) 
can ever afford to forget. Undoubtedly there is 
room in our schools for technical and vocational 
training; but it is equally undoubted that no true 
patriot can ever allow such training to infringe in 
the slightest upon the needs of a broad and funda- 
mental liberalism. 

In the interests of that liberalism the school-child, 
from his primary years, should have it impressed 
upon his mind that his public schooling, while a 



20 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

free gift from the state, is not given without expec- 
tation of return. He should have it impressed upon 
his mind that his privileges imply responsibilties, 
and that the first and last of his duties is to bring 
to the service of the state and the community such 
an understanding of human life as only an imper- 
sonal outlook can give. It is altogether a mistake 
to permit young children even to think too seriously 
of their own careers in the world. They should 
rather be concerned with mastering its history and 
problems, and in acquiring such an understanding of 
human nature as shall make them judges of the gen- 
eral good. \Mthout such an attitude of mind the 
liberties of society cannot be safeguarded, while it 
is hardly conceivable that all the time and effort 
devoted to its cultivation will react otherwise upon 
our technical and industrial life than for greater 
intelligence of direction and fruitfulness of achieve- 
ment. 

There is, of course (and this is in the nature of a 
caution), possible misdirection of devotion to others. 
Youth is naturally eager and generous and quick 
with desire to serve. "Social service," indeed, has 
become a perilous term nowadays, our danger being 
that we shall get too many servants and too little 
that is worthy of service. It is essential, therefore, 
that the lesson of modesty be learned well, and this 
can best be achieved by the truest liberalism. Say 
to the young, 'Tf you would best serve the state and 
best serve mankind, this will be most fullv accom- 



THE SCHOOL AND THE COMMONWEALTH 21 

plished and to the height of your abihties by a culti- 
vated interest in the best and soHdest in human 
thought and the noblest in human nature; such an 
interest you can obtain by study, without thought 
of self, which in making you an intelligent human 
being will thereby make of you a true guardian 
of the social good." Service of mankind is, after 
all, not best realized in alms to individuals, apart 
from their deserts, but in devotion to the best that 
human nature is capable of; and this can be known 
only through study of what men have thought and 
done. 

Liberal education is not a cheap thing, either for 
the generation w^hich gives it or for the generation 
which receives it. The one must make sacrifices 
of material comforts for the sake of the upbring- 
ing of its young; and it should endeavor, for the 
sake of that progress, which means social health, to 
pass to its youth something more in the way of op- 
portunity than it had received from its own fathers. 
The other must give hard and unselfish effort to the 
work which sound schooling always implies; for 
neither understanding of truth nor of virtue nor of 
beauty comes without some toil. Fortunately, deep 
in human nature is a generous devotion of parents 
to the good of their children and a generous devo- 
tion of youth to all that appeals to what is noblest in 
man's soul. It but remains for the teachers, first, 
to understand the spirit of liberalism, and second, to 
be able so to make its needs manifest, to parents and 



22 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

children alike, that through understanding they will 
desire it and will devote their efforts wholeheartedly 
to its attainment. 



LETTER III 

THE SCHOOL AND THE COMMUNITY 

WHAT I said in my last letter with regard 
to the relation of the schools and the com- 
monwealth I hold to be the first principle of a truly 
American education. From the primary school to 
the university, the first aim of the public schools 
should be the inculcation of such a liberalism of 
mind as shall ensure the perpetuity of an intelligent 
democracy. Liberalism, not vocationalism, must be 
the first word in all public education; it is for this 
that the schools are created, replacing the old ap- 
prenticings of youth (but an earlier form of voca- 
tional training) by an education designed not only 
to make good craftsmen, but wise citizens. This 
principle, I repeat, must never be forgotten by 
teachers or school officials or by the community, and 
the children themselves must be made to understand 
it from the beginning. Without such education 
democracy rides to its ruin. 

But this is not to say that the school as an insti- 
tution need rest with this attainment, or that the 
community, having provided for the one thing indis- 
pensable, need make no further effort. Fortunately, 
the material cost of liberalism is slight ; it is not only 

23 



24 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

the most important, it is the least costly element in 
our education. A teacher with the gift of under- 
standing and a few good books are all the equip- 
ment that is necessary, — for there is eternal truth 
in the old definition of a college : a log with a student 
at one end and Mark Hopkins at the other. No 
community is too poor to afford liberal training; 
and few communities there are that cannot afford 
much in addition. Indeed, a community which is 
itself liberally trained will insist upon its schools 
giving much in addition. 

It will insist, for one thing, that the local schools 
shall be representative and distinctive of the local 
community. In its broad fundamentals, state edu- 
cation must be uniform in content; but certainly 
there should never be such a systematization of it, 
from any center, as should preclude each community 
from finding the highest expression of its own 
needs and genius in its schools, or should hamper 
a teacher in developing new modes of securing the 
essential content. Local government is our first 
training for state government, and in order to be 
sound training it must be free. Freedom is equally 
essential in the local schools; they should never re- 
fuse guidance from above, but they should be slow 
indeed to permit dictation. Liberty and responsi- 
bility — these are only secured in their exercise. 

In order to represent a community a school must 
respond to the community's interests and guide its 



THE SCHOOL AND THE COMMUNITY 25 

interests. Both of these are important — the re- 
sponse and the guidance. 

The response, of course, will be to needs felt in 
the consciousness of the local public. Naturally — 
since man's life is, after all, primarily still that of 
the Adam who digged and delved, — the material 
and practical needs of the community will be often- 
est emphatic in the minds of its elders. Parents 
will perforce be thinking of the careers of their 
children, even when the children are still innocent 
of ambition; and from this thought will come a 
legitimate concern for the vocational side of school- 
ing. Undoubtedly it should receive a wise response 
from the schools. In a community where manu- 
facturing is a great interest, and in the inevitable 
course of events many of the youth are bound in 
time to replace their parents in the parents' occu- 
pations, it is reasonable that the schools should give 
the young an understanding of the principles and 
aims of craftsmanship (which ought by no means 
to imply a specific apprenticeship to one narrow 
trade — surely beyond the rights of any public 
school) . Similarly, in an agricultural community, a 
knowledge of nature and the love of it would be the 
best of introductions to life for those who were to 
become nature's especial intimates. There is, be- 
sides, in every community a scattering of boys and 
girls gifted with a genius unrelated to the accident 
of their birthplace, and no school can afford to be 
without opportunities for the child who brings to 



26 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

the world an aptitude for art or science or invention, 
or for the one who is born with that zeal for man- 
kind whose expression is the lives of saints and 
apostles. The local school should have for a prime 
object its own power of adaptation and change, not 
only to meet possible changes in the local industry 
(say, from cattle to corn, or agriculture to oil) but 
even more to suit itself to the genius by whose birth 
the community might be blessed. Schools ought not 
to represent systems through which human life is 
forced by mechanical pressure; they should rather 
be gardens in which the natural souls of men are 
fosteringly nurtured. In brief, the child, not the 
institution, is the true object of education. 

But the child is not the only object of education, 
nor is the school capable of responding merely to the 
industrial needs of the community. Men's educa- 
tion never really ceases while they continue to live 
and act; and their schooldays ought never to come 
to an end. I mean this quite literally. It is my en- 
tire belief that the school of the future will stand 
not merely for the years five to twenty, but one to 
three score and ten. I said that in its community 
the school should not merely respond to local inter- 
ests, it should also guide them; it should discover 
for them and aid them to answer what they so often 
unconsciously and far more intensely desire. Here 
is where the teacher should be a true leader of 
society, a psychologist of no meager gifts and a 
citizen ''primus inter pares." 



THE SCHOOL AND THE COMMUNITY 27 

The Adam who digged and delved is, after all, 
but the **first Adam," suffering the penalty of his 
natural weakness. But there is, in us all, a "last 
Adam," who, as St. Paul says, is "a quickening 
spirit." Not always is the last Adam a conscious 
soul; often, alas, life is such as to becloud and con- 
ceal his faculties. It is for the teachers — who are 
spiritual leaders if they are anything — to awaken 
and reveal this last Adam, and find for him, no 
matter what his years as to the flesh, in the schools, 
the opportunity of understanding and expressioil. 
Men and women and little children, along with 
schoolboys and schoolgirls, all should look to the 
public school as the fostering mother — alma mater 
— of their fuller life. 

The thing is not difficult to imagine, and, I be- 
lieve, would be not very difficult of realization. It 
could begin unpretentiously; and once 'started — 
granted understanding leadership, — the end would 
be achieved almost without resistance. Once get 
firmly centered in the mind of the community that 
the public school is not merely the temporary war- 
den of youth, but is a part of the life of the com- 
munity and of every individual in the commun- 
ity throughout his life, and the schools and the 
teaching profession alike will be transformed; wWle 
as for the state, it will be more firmly founded than 
ever in the truest of democracies. 

Let me indicate the process I have in mind, men- 
tioning first of all those needs which the schools can 



28 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

serve. These are the needs of those very faculties 
which it is the purpose of hberaHsm to cultivate; 
the need of the intellect, which is instruction in 
truth; the need of the imagination, which is images 
of beauty; the need of the moral nature, which is 
social understanding and sympathy, and, in a more 
intimate form, the desire for participation in all 
that is good and noble, for which the school should 
stand along with the church. Such are the needs of 
the ''last Adam" when at length he makes his self- 
discovery, — needs which do not pertain to him as a 
private body, but as a public spirit and a sharer in 
humanity. 

Ministration to such needs ought to begin with 
books, which are the records and perpetuators of 
the liberal gains of the human spirit. The circula- 
tory system is not more essential to the health of 
the body, pumping red blood constantly to every 
wasting organ, than is the library to liberal culture. 
Every school should not only have a library, it 
should be a library; and every schoolmaster should 
be the librarian of his community, guiding the selec- 
tion and advising in the use of books. Children, of 
course, should be habituated to the use of books 
from their first reading years, and they should have 
the satisfaction of their material and accessible 
presence. But the community, also, should look to 
the schoolhouse as the center of its reading interest, 
— open of afternoons and evenings to all comers, to 
the profit of all and the pride of all. Libraries are 



THE SCHOOL AND THE COMMUNITY 29 

anchors of civilization and no community should 
be satisfied without firm anchorage. 

Again, every school should be provided with an 
entertainment hall — simple in form, but dignified 
and beautiful, as simple things may be, — and, for 
outdoor weather, with a festal greensward. The 
love of beauty is native to all men, but taste needs 
cultivation, and cultivation means, most of all, op- 
portunity to see the beautiful. Here again, the 
teacher should be the leader, devising constantly new 
forms of entertainment — music and dancing, exhi- 
bitions and lectures, pageantry and drama, — which 
the community should not only be offered for its 
appreciation, but in which it could find opportunity 
of expression (the straightest path to appreciation). 
Why, for example, should not every schoolhouse. 
city and country, be the possessor of its own cinema, 
giving what is good and lasting from this wonder- 
ful invention and thereby eradicating the cheap and 
sensational and often damnable "movie"? Even 
more, the beauty of rhythmic motion and dramatic 
imitation, which children naturally delight to give 
expression to and elders delight to contemplate, 
should draw youth and age together in a bond of 
lasting sympathy, — so that the whole community 
would turn to the school as surely as the flower 
turns to sunlight for the illumination of life. Cer- 
tainly, were I the maker of the school calendar, it 
would be bright with red-letter days. 

Finally there is the steadier and not less important 



30 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

response which the school could give to the social 
instincts of the community. Why should the school- 
house not become the clubhouse of its neighborhood? 
Young folks and elders alike have numberless occa- 
sions for meeting in social groups, formally and in- 
formally. There should not be a sharp line of dis- 
tinction between the affairs of youth and those of 
age; at least, in many matters the interests of life 
should be without this division. Further, youth 
will gain in maturity and judgment, as age in fresh- 
ness and inspiration, from a close association, es- 
pecially in public matters; and the schoolhouse is 
the proper place for bringing about this union. The 
old-time lyceum performed such a function, and 
performed it to the profit of a good Americanism. 
It will never return in the old form, but it may well 
be brought back, and should be brought back, in the 
newer form of the community clubhouse, which 
should surely be the schoolhouse. In it, or in con- 
nection with it, should be provided reading rooms 
and rest rooms, and club rooms, and debating 
rooms (all of which are functions that can be 
adapted to any set of four walls) ; and there should 
be provided also outdoor grounds for sports and 
greens for picnics, for the physical school should 
be not merely bricks and glass, but park and garden 
as well. All ages and sexes and conditions of life 
should find their way to the schoolyard, not once, 
but many times a year ; and so, indeed, they would, 
once the idea were made vivid and the habit started, 



THE SCHOOL AND THE COMMUNITY 31 

for the realization of all this is only a matter of a 
leader with the power to give vivid expression to 
the idea and the skill to give intelligent direction to 
the forming habit. 

Could a school occupying the place in the life of 
the community which I have suggested be anything 
less than a fortress of democratic liberty and true 
popular sovereignty? It would cultivate intelligent 
thought through books and discourse; it would 
awaken and preserve the patriotism of its own com- 
munity's and of the nation's ideals through a noble 
and native art ; it would bring men and women and 
children together in a spirit of sympathy, playful or 
serious, without self-seeking, without private ambi- 
tion. Finally, the institution itself, the school of the 
community, would stand physically and spiritually as 
the symbol of the higher life and nobler ideals of 
that community. Can it be doubted that in the pres- 
ence of such a symbol the citizens would more 
clearly think through the issues of human life, in- 
dividual and public, and would desire more ardently 
the best ? And so I would say to my fellow teachers 
of Nebraska: Let us work with this ideal until 
Nebraska's schools shall be like shining standards, 
like emblazoned banners, proclaiming what men live 
and labor for under the blue Nebraska skies ! 



LETTER IV 

THE SCHOOLYARD 

FOR the nonce I should Hke to be visionary and 
indulge an Utopian fancy — remembering (as 
I would have my readers remember) that all the 
monuments which mankind has erected were once 
but Utopian visions, and that it is out of such vis- 
ions that the selective years make their choices of 
the ideals which men deem worth working for. At 
least one fruit of the cultivation of the imagination 
is to give men those images of ideal things from 
which the possible are chosen and the actual created. 
Ever since, as a boy, I went to school at the old 
frame house, foursquare with the four winds, and 
shivered in a corner far from the stove, I have 
formed and reformed my speculative vision of the 
ideal school — which, of course, has grown in 
form and finish with the cumulative terms. In 
the first place, I would have the school buildings, 
if not monumental, at all events beautiful in form 
and proportion and attractive in site; for I am a 
firm believer in the power of noble architecture to 
inspire noble thinking. Architecture is, after all, 
the most humane of all arts ; for it is concerned not 
in imitating the forms of nature, but in satisfying 

33 



34 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

directly human needs, and of all the works of man 
it is capable of giving the most conscious impres- 
sion of the strength and dignity of his intelligence. 
Architectural quality should be a prime requisite of 
every public building and most of all of educational 
buildings, where the whole spirit of the state is 
being formed. 

But architecture must be appropriately seated, 
and my second demand (not less imperative than 
the first) is that every school yard should be a gar- 
den. I do not mean a vegetable garden (though in 
cities space for even that is worth while), but I do 
mean a garden of trees and shrubs and flowers, 
and above all a garden for the bright graces of child- 
hood and youth — an embowered playground. The 
seat of the most famous of all universities, the 
Academy of Plato, was a grove ; and nowhere should 
a fane of education be erected in less devoted sur- 
roundings. Every school yard should be famed for 
its elms and oaks, its lilacs and roses ; for the beauty 
of architecture is never perfect save it be set in the 
friendly context of the beauty of nature — nor, I 
think, is it far-fetched to suppose that the subtle 
lesson of the interdependence of man and nature 
may be first impressed by this outward symbol. At 
any rate, beautiful groves have always seemed to 
men sacred. 

There is, in cities, another reason for park-like 
school yards. The streeets of modern towns are 
becoming yearly more perilous, while the houses 



THE SCHOOLYARD 35 

themselves are more and more packed and gregari- 
ous — the lot spaces shrinking, the flat and apartment 
houses increasing in number, and the children in 
consequence being crowded more and more to the 
literal walls. It seems amazing to me, in view of 
all the sentiment we have for golden childhood and 
in view of the undoubted love of parents for their 
children, that such meager intelligence is use.d in 
providing space for the life of childhood — space, 
space, space! with sunlight and turf and room for 
running. Sooner or later (and, oh, it should be 
sooner) our communities will awaken to a con- 
sciousness of their own blind cruelty, and they will 
restore to the children the right to out-of-doors 
which God gave them. And surely the school- 
masters and school directors should be the leaders in 
such a movement. For which reason, I think, no 
city or village school should be set in a space of less 
than two ordinary town blocks; while even the 
country school can afford to choose a fair field for 

its site. This at least, out of my Utopia, I shall 
prophesy — that the school of the future will be 
seated in a garden. 

But let us enter my imaginary school garden — 

two hundred yards long by a hundred wide, or 

thereabouts, with the buildings forming a solid H, 

following the lines of the rectangle, and enclosing 

two courts for sports and out-door school (for I 

see no good reason why in fine weather school 

should be an indoor affair) . A low wall, with vines 



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THE SCHOOLYARD 37 

running over it and flowers and shrubs lining it, 
surrounds the school precincts, while at each corner 
of the grounds there are clumps of trees, with play 
or picnic spaces on the sward beneath. We will en- 
ter where the path comes in beside one of these 
clumps — say, at the northwest, for normally the 
axis of the plan should be north and south. 

As we turn into the path, we perceive to our left, 
at the north center of the grounds and a bit secluded 
by greenery, a small chapel built on the old Byzan- 
tine plan of superposed cross and circle. We may 
return to this bye and bye; for the present, we are 
drawn in the opposite direction. There we see — 
dignified with those columned porticoes which in 
themselves are the architectural image of learning 
and stateliness — the facades of the two buildings 
which form the extremities of the upper arms of our 
H. That which we are passing, to the right, is the 
museum of the civic and school district. It con- 
tains the gifts of beautiful and curious objects 
which every community receives when it provides a 
place for them; it contains natural history collec- 
tions; it contains exhibits of the artistic work of 
the school children, or others; and it is of course 
provided with spaces for special exhibitions of in- 
terest to the community. There are rest rooms 
and store rooms below the main floor, and on the 
floor above are women's rooms — small committee 
or conference rooms and a large community club 
room for women, open every day. The branch 



38 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

of the H leading back from this to the transverse 
central building, contains on the first floor primary 
grade rooms (as does the corresponding branch 
across the court), while the second floor is devoted 
to studios and rooms for girls' instruction in things 
domestic (let us not call it by the terrifying name 
of ''domestic science!"). Naturally, quarters for 
cooking and dining are adjacent to this section, and 
they are to be found in the western end of the cen- 
tral transverse. 

But we are moving too rapidly from the entrance. 
The building corresponding to the museum, at the 
north end of our H, is the community library, with 
men's club rooms in the basement, and on the second 
floor reading and study rooms, leading directly into 
the grade rooms of the adjacent branch, which 
should have free access to the use of books. Be- 
yond, in the eastern wing of the central building, 
are locker and rest-rooms, teachers' quarters, and, 
toward the street (as also on the corresponding 
west extremity of the bar) a semi-circular sun-room 
to be used especially for little folk whose health 
needs double care. The south extensions of the 
arms of our H, beyond the transverse, on the east 
are devoted to school rooms for the grades, and 
beyond, widening away from the court to allow 
greater space for sports, to a gymnasium; while on 
the west, the technical and scientific laboratories 
lead on to shops for wood and metal working — 
which ought to be open from eight o'clock of morn- 



THE SCHOOLYARD 39 

ings until nine at night, with free privilege of work 
to all school boys. Indeed, the whole western sec- 
tion of the school, which is devoted to arts and 
crafts, should keep open for long hours, giving the 
widest opportunity for the independently ambitious 
maker (and all youths are ambitious makers) to 
exercise his craftsman's ingenuity. 

Between the shops and the gymnasium extends 
the great playground, with ball-court, tennis, and 
what not, for the older children — the youths. And 
there are seats for spectators against the south wall 
— rather for the elders than the young; for youth 
should play and age applaud, where sports are the 
issue (not but what father should come to the bat 
w^hen son wants a little quiet game at the old 
gentleman's expense — or there might be quoits 
under the trees for the fat and sedate). 

But the central building of our group is yet to 
describe. It is the architectural key and crown, the 
two courts formed by the branches of the H con- 
stituting its approaches. Loftier than the adjacent 
wings, or any other unit of the whole, it is capped 
by a dome — in my school, by an observatory with 
telescope, for the observation of the stars is one of 
the most fascinating and ennobling of studies, the 
parent of science, the inspiration of philosophies, the 
true liberalizer of the imagination. Beneath this 
dome is the theatre, for school assemblies, for pub- 
lic meetings, for civic or community drama and 
music. Drama is and should be the natural art of 



40 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

democracies. Further, it can be made and should 
be made an important and continuous feature of 
public instruction — continuous from school days on 
throughout life's course. There is no reason why 
the schools of a community should not furnish dra- 
matic entertainments of many kinds — plays, operas, 
cinemas, pageants, vaudeville (if it be made what it 
can be). There is every reason why the schools 
should furnish such entertainments — as for the cul- 
tivation of taste and morals, for the advancement of 
intelligent citizenship (for so many reasons that I 
propose to write a letter on just this by and by) . In 
my ideal school, certainly, this theater is never idle, 
but for school children and citizens alike it is perpet- 
ually presenting the best attainable, and perpetually 
bettering the attainable in creating the demand for 
its betterment. 

The front of this central theater, facing the north 
court, is in the form of an outdoor stage — for in 
such a climate as Nebraska's there are many, many 
days when an outdoor performance is the most 
charming of all. This, too, for music (chorus, 
band, or orchestral) is the ideal place, with the gar- 
dened court before it for spectators and listeners. 
You will remember that the first story school-rooms 
opening on this court from the sides are for the 
primary grades; and these rooms open out in wide 
sunny arches, forming a loggia all around the court, 
with a balcony above from the second-story rooms 
— all like the two tiers of boxes in a theater, afford- 



THE SCHOOLYARD 41 

ing seating for the spectacle staged out-of-doors. 
The space beneath is a formal garden, with a large 
paved circle just before the stage (like the orchestra 
of a Greek theater), and lesser circles or hexa- 
gons, surrounded by seats, interspersed by urn- 
borne plants and flower beds. Here the smallest 
folk have their play, and here, on sunny days, their 
teachers bring them out for lessons while of eve- 
nings the whole court is lighted with garden lan- 
terns, and the grown-ups listen to the music, or 
watch the pageant on the stage or the dancing in 
the paved orchestra. In fact, this area is the center 
of community recreation, and the question of the 
day always is, *'What is going on at the school- 
theater tonight?" 

We have now completed the circuit of the school- 
yard, and are returned to the northern entrance. 
There before us, facing the court, but secluded in 
its setting of shrubs is the little Byzantine chapel 
which we passed when entering. We will suppose 
that the day is drawing to a close, and the hour for 
vespers is come (5 o'clock of winters, 7 o'clock in 
the summertime), and so we pass in at the open 
door and take our seats quietly. The light is the 
light of sundown toned and hued by the stained- 
glass windows — a many-colored dusk at once soft- 
ening and delicately illuminating. The service is 
in the same quiet spirit; it is without introduction, 
without formality ; there is an organist playing — one 
who loves and understands the instrument; that is 



42 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

all. Those who attend may be a score, may be but 
two or three, or but one. It makes no difference; 
the organist plays the noble and beautiful music of 
the church, and the hearers enter and slip away 
quietly. Chapel services (never compulsory) are 
held of mornings; the vespers are daily, too. But 
all day long the doors of the little chapel are open; 
and whoever of the whole community there may be 
who wishes to withdraw from the world for a still 
and meditative hour, contemplating, perhaps, a re- 
production of one of the world's masterpieces of 
religious art (nowadays within the reach of all), 
finds here, in the cruciform chapel, the privilege of 
quiet and self-communion. And not only the elders 
come, but often the youth. For youth is a period 
when many solitary battles of the spirit must be 
fought through; when friends and teachers and 
parents are all helpless, and the boy must find his 
courage, the girl her strength, from other than 
human aid. 

Perhaps night will have fallen when we emerge 
from the grateful quiet, and as we turn away we 
glance once more at the buildings we have explored. 
The frosted lamps under the porticoes that lead 
into the library and museum give them a more im- 
posing beauty; while lighted windows show that 
both buildings are in full use. In the courtyard pic- 
turesque garden lanterns give a romantic charm, and 
there is already a sound of evening gaiety, for the 
folk are gathering. We look up, and we see that 



THE SCHOOLYARD 43 

the stars are. coming out, and we suspect that even 
now there is some eager star-gazer in the observa- 
tory, high over all. For all of us are star-gazers; 
and always there are Utopias ; and the distance from 
earth to heaven is measured by a thought. 



LETTER V 
THE CURRICULUM 

U /"CURRICULUM" is a word I detest. It 

V / means a race-course and it suggests to my 

mind the image of a grand free-for-all in which 
the children — some with blinders and some with in- 
terference guards — are the entries; the teachers, 
with snapping whips and reins taut, are the jockeys; 
the parents are the bettors on the side-lines ; and the 
grades are the marks of the course, leading up to 
the finish, where the youngsters come under the 
line nose to nose at commencement. The whole 
thing is full of dash and *'pep" — and empty of 
meaning. 

I do not mean to say that the subjects studied in 
the schools are vain or that the methods of teaching 
are inept; that could be but the judgment of igno- 
rance. But I do say that my own most vivid im- 
pression of our "courses" of study, in grades and 
university alike, is of organization and systematiza- 
tion and theorization that obscures and threatens to 
destroy the true meaning and value of public edu- 
cation. The machinery of instruction has become 
so intricate that more attention is drawn to its opera- 
tion than to its product. This is wholly damaging 

45 



46 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

to the intelligences of both teacher and pupil. In- 
deed, we should reconstruct our image of our own 
task; the school should be not a factory, but a gar- 
den ; the teacher not a machinist, but a cultivator. I 
am no farmer, but I have no doubt that the first rule 
of good agriculture is. Keep your eye on the crop. 

The crop which the public schools are to produce 
is intelligent citizenship, and the seed which they 
must sow and nurture is the seed of liberal learn- 
ing. Everything else, therefore, is secondary to the 
old trinity — reading, writing, and arithmetic — which 
is the beginning of liberalism. If the schools but 
teach these three they have given keys to all other 
knowledge. Mankind has devised two great modes 
of communicating ideas — language and number. 
Each of these is an instrument of the intelligence, 
nor can human intelligence move freely if either be 
undeveloped. In looking to the end of education, 
therefore, it is first of all essential to provide for the 
mastery of these first gifts of civilization — which 
are also its last preservers. 

The study of number leads to various attain- 
ments. I suppose its most obvious end is the prac- 
tical. It is not merely to the small transactions of 
daily life that number is the key — to the use of 
clocks, time-tables, class periods, business appoint- 
ments, meal hours, to money, transactions, accounts 
— but, in a broader scope, most of our material civ- 
ilization is built upon mathematics; mechanics, 
manufactures, engineering, building, taxation, com- 



THE CURRICULUM 47 

merce, and again, the sciences, physical and biologi- 
cal alike, all are dominated by the need of an under- 
standing of number. There is a kind of standard- 
ization of civilization which is represented by its 
mastery of mathematics, and is only in part sym- 
bolized by such universals as the metric system or 
Greenwich time, measures, respectively, of earth 
and heaven. The study of number leads directly to 
the understanding of geography and astronomy, 
and after these to the sciences, applied and theoreti- 
cal, natural and social — and it is this fact, even more 
than its immediate utilities, that makes of arithme- 
tic the most practical of studies. 

But there are other than these practical conse- 
quences of the study of number. First, the most 
direct road to knowledge of right and wrong, true 
and false, is via arithmetic. In other fields of 
knowledge persuasion is needed to convince of the 
right or demonstrate the true. In mathematics the 
process of demonstration is a process of discovery, 
and the learner finds out for himself that the line 
between truth and error is hard and undeviating. 
This is a moral lesson — the moral lesson that is the 
foundation of all integrity of character. Second, 
and directly related to the preceding, arithmetic is 
the road to the discovery of our common-sense. 
Number is the most universal of all languages; its 
truths are undeniably clear to all men. Everywhere 
else there is room for disagreement ; in mathematics 
we find the common ground of men's common 



48 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

thinking. This is what we mean by common- 
sense ; and it is a thing of no small significance that 
human beings may be brought to this degree of mu- 
tual understanding without effort, for it symbolizes 
the possibility of a final understanding in all our 
vital human affairs. Even before the great war 
men had begun to dream of a universal science, 
shared by the thinkers of all nations and leading, 
through scientific congresses and world confer- 
ences, to an eventual political understanding. 
The thing is not yet impossible, and all (in 
last analysis) just because there is no disputing 
about arithmetical truths. And thirdly, from the 
study of number comes the most conscious mental 
self-reliance. Of all human arts, the cultivation of 
mathematics is least dependent upon external condi- 
tions — it is equally possible in Greenland or the 
Congo; it is an affair of man's intellectual powers, 
and its consequences and constructions are so in- 
finitely varied that we speak, and speak correctly, 
of a world of mathematics, meaning a world of the 
mind's own self-reliant discoveries. Each of these 
three, knowledge of truth and error, participation 
in humanity's common-sense, and the self-reliance 
of the intelligence, is a quality fundamental in the 
building up of human character. Is it a wonder, 
then, that Plato set over the portal of his academy, 
''Let none ignorant of number enter here" ? 

But along with number must come mastery of 
that other great means of human communication. 



THE CURRICULUM 49 

language. Reading is the key to the discovery of 
what others think ; writing is the instrument for the 
expression of one's own thoughts. These two are 
the give and take of discourse, and it needs no ex- 
position to show that they are the first needs of a 
democratic state. One can imagine dumb slaves at 
labor under a master or monks living in their soli- 
tary cells under a vow of silence; but in a free polit- 
ical society there must be a free expression — debate, 
oratory, the press, literature, all calling for a skillful 
power of speech and a willingness to hear and read. 
Besides this public value, there is all that a knowl- 
edge of books can mean for the enriching of the life 
of the individual (as a giver and as a receiver). 
Indeed, one has but to reflect how narrow is the let- 
terless life, how defrauded of its possibilities, to be 
doubly convinced that a love of reading is the first 
gift of education. 

The point of the study ought to be a love of read- 
ing and the cultivation of a literate taste, rather than 
a stressing of forms and apparatus — whether the 
language be native or foreign. Language exists 
primarily for use, and its use is the communication 
of ideas. I never could see much reason in the no- 
tion that the study of language is a ''discipline," 
the good of which is to be derived from its diffi- 
culty. Of course there is grammar to be mastered 
and vocabulary to be memorized, and more than all, 
comprehension to be given of the fact that language 
is capable of style and is only effective when the 



50 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

Style is appropriate — that is, that there are differ- 
ent styles for different occasions, and in particular 
marked differences between the use of language in 
oral discourse and its use in literary forms. But 
all this is instrumental to the great end of learning 
to read and to love reading. For it is not only from 
reading that we get our fuller appreciation of beau- 
tiful speech, but it is reading which opens up to us 
the vast fields of history and philosophy and poetry, 
and all of that great inheritance of the thought of 
great minds and the records of great achievements 
which give civilization its meaning and national tra- 
dition its pride and spirit. I regard my own uni- 
versity courses primarily as introductions to certain 
fields of literature — groups of books; and my pur- 
pose in teaching is to persuade those who come to 
me to read further in these books than any limited 
course of study can provide for. This, I believe, 
should be the impulse of all study of languages 
(English or other) — to cultivate the love of books. 
And of course, books should be provided; a school 
without a library is groping in the night. 

Writing is the complement of reading. It is the 
art of the expression of thought (in no small part, 
therefore, the art of thinking), and it should be 
taught as an art. Penmanship and spelling are to 
writing what grammar and vocabulary are to read- 
ing — instrumental and preparatory. The real pur- 
pose of the art is self-expression. Think for a mo- 
ment what the first-class mail of the United States 



THE CURRICULUM 51 

means to the community, not merely in the way of 
economic and civic solidarity, but in the far more 
fundamental task of keeping alive and eager those 
warm instincts of human kinship — family and 
friendly and social — upon which our mutual sym- 
pathies rest; is it not, then, certain that the writer 
of even the most personal letter is serving the state 
and the cause of mankind? For the cultivation of 
the humane in human nature is assuredly the great- 
est of the causes to which human effort is devoted. 

Doubtless some of my readers are wondering 
why all this talk about the obvious. Of course the 
three "r's" are taught, and will continue to be 
taught. But are they always taught with under- 
standing of their purposes? — an understanding 
which the pupil should acquire no less than the 
teacher have. The question was put in a class in 
educational theory: ''Ought a prospective farmer 
be given the same instruction in writing as a pros- 
pective clerk?" The question misses the whole 
point of the art of writing and the whole meaning 
of liberal education. When teachers of teachers 
entertain such problems as real it is surely not un- 
timely still to discuss the meaning of the elements 
of learning. 

Furthermore, I have that suspicion of the curric- 
ulum which I mentioned at the outset. It seems to 
me that the constant peril of systematized schools 
is of falling into the notion that the rote and rou- 
tine are more important than the ends of study. So 



52 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

many periods of this subject or that, so many pages 
of the textbook, so many required topics out of 
the way — all this gets into the teacher's mind and 
contagiously passes to the pupil; until the whole 
affair of schooling becomes a game (which the 
skillful student delights to *'beat"), or a race the 
object of which is to cover the widest range of ter- 
ritory in the fewest possible years — which means 
seeing school-life and all life quite awry. 

Rather (if we are to stand for liberalism) we 
should be looking always to the ends. Teacher and 
pupil alike should become aware that arithmetic and 
the other branches of mathematics are a magic key 
to the unlocking of nature's secrets — that the whole 
daylit world is full of numbers, and that the more 
one knows of numbers the better will be one's un- 
derstanding of the world. They should perceive, 
too, that honesty and rectitude and integrity of mind 
are related to number, and that arithmetic is good 
common sense. The pupil should be introduced as 
soon as possible to the world of thought and imagi- 
nation which reading opens — history, literature, 
speculation; and the love of these things should be 
the constant end of tuition. And through reading 
and writing alike the youngster should be brought 
to understand that language — even one's mother 
tongue — is an art of thinking and expression, and 
is therefore a possession well worth pains and striv- 
ing. The art of teaching is surely an art of show- 
ing ends worth working for. The teacher cannot 



THE CURRICULUM 53 

give the benefits of study; he can only point them 
out, and by example and enthusiasm for the best in- 
spire in the student that willingness to work, with- 
out which there can be no education. It must be 
generous work, too, if liberal culture is to be at- 
tained — given for love of the things sought, for 
knowledge of truth and perception of beauty and 
strengthening of character; and it ought not to seem 
to any child or youth merely a race for so many 
buttons or credits or for nosing out at the finish. 



LETTER VI. 

THE HUMANITIES 

SUBJECTS studied in school, broadly divided, 
fall into four classes. There are, first, the in- 
struments of learning, languages and mathematics, 
without which advance in any line is impossible. 
Second, there are the practical studies, leading to 
craftsmanship and vocation. Third, there are the 
natural sciences; and fourth, the humanities. Of 
these four groups, the first two are instrumental in 
character; they have to do either with the mastery 
of the keys to study or with the attainment of pro- 
ficiency in some special art that ministers to one's 
bread and butter activities. The second two, the 
sciences and the humanities, are in the nature of 
ends, rather than means, so far as the life of the 
individual is concerned; and it is their office to 
broaden and clarify his impersonal understanding 
of life, — his political judgment, taken in the widest 
and truest sense. In my last letter I talked about 
the general bearings of study of language and num- 
ber; in future letters I propose to discuss vocational 
and scientific studies. Here, and in letters imme- 
diately following, I wish to dwell upon the signifi- 
cance in education of the study of literature, history, 
philosophy, — the Htterae humaniores. 

55 



56 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

Literature as it should be defined in the concep- 
tion of teachers is indeed as broad as the humani- 
ties : it includes not only the imaginative expression 
of great minds, in poetry and fiction, but also the 
intellectual expression which molds the destinies of 
races and nations and the reflection of thinkers upon 
both the world of men's affairs and the world of 
nature. Among the classics of English literature 
are not only Shakespeare's plays and Thackeray's 
novels, but Milton's Areopagitica, Darwin's Origin 
of Species, the Federalist Papers, the Gettysburg 
speech. The length and breadth and height and 
depth of human thought about human things is 
comprised within the radius of the humanities. 

Literature in this broad and true sense is not lim- 
ited by national or linguistic boundaries ; it is as ex- 
tensive as is the world of books. This means that 
its whole range should, in a sense, be comprised in 
its beginnings ; and that the teacher who undertakes 
to guide the first interest of children in English lit- 
erature should already be thinking in the terms of 
that general European literature, of which English 
is only a special department. English literature, to 
be sure, forms our natural introduction to this more 
general field ; and we of the English speech are for- 
tunate, indeed, in possessing natively so noble a con- 
tribution to serve as our introduction to the whole. 
But we should not lose sight of the fact that the 
completer our acquaintanceship with the whole the 
truer will be, not only our understanding of the 



THE HUMANITIES 57 

meaning of letters, but also our understanding of 
our own literature. European literature, from classi- 
cal times onward, forms a single and consecutive 
story, reflecting the achievements of that European 
civilization and ideal of life which is ours by right 
of inheritance and development. 

All this may be made to begin to appear in the 
very earliest stages of schooling. I do not, of 
' course, mean that young children should have their 
attention directed to facts about literary relation- 
ships; that would be absurd. But I do mean that 
in the selection of, say, fairy and other forms of 
folk tales, of simple ballads, and the like, we are al- 
ready laying the foundations for an eventual appre- 
ciation of European literature as a whole. For 
both in form and content these tales and ballads are 
universal, passing from language to language and 
from century to century with little alteration: They 
are probably the most ancient and are certainly the 
most widespread of literary forms. In the course 
of time a body of classics has been established in 
this field no less than in the more mature ranges of 
literary expression; and it should be a part of every 
child's education to know these classics. For my 
part, I think it far more important that my boy 
should know his Aesop and Grimm and Mother 
Goose than that he should be indulged in the can- 
died tidbits that fill some of our "modern" school 
readers. 

The principle which I am indicating should be 



58 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

extended from the first reading years to the end of 
Hfe — the principle of progressive acquaintanceship 
with the best. The world's body of classics is not 
so vast but that the greater part of it may become 
the possession of almost anyone who early develops 
a taste for it. If teachers, therefore, by taking 
thought, see to it that in each grade of advancement 
the boy or girl be shown only the best and be asked 
to give effort to this alone, it can hardly be but that 
in time the student's own selective judgment will 
carry him forward. Aly own notion is that there 
are three capital rules which should govern school 
reading. They are : ( 1 ) All formally assigned 
readings and memorizings should be of acknowl- 
edged classics. (2) Assigned readings should al- 
ways be effort-exacting; the reader must be taught 
to think as he reads. (3) Reading should be free 
and extensive; there should be for each reader an 
unexhausted supply of the best books suitable to his 
years. 

The first of these points hardly needs discussion. 
The word "classic," to be sure, sticks in the gorge 
of some; but the thing itself is not terrible if we 
but recollect that it is used only as meaning what has 
been tried out and found by long usage to be the 
best. Most of the works which we call classics — 
at any rate in the Greek and Latin fields — have been 
school books for centuries; and they have been 
chosen and used as school books primarily because 
they are simple and clear. It is these qualities of 



THE HUMANITIES 59 

simplicity and clearness, coupled with beauty, no- 
bility and truth of thought, that make classics in all 
languages; classic literature is therefore in the best 
sense the most accessible of all literature. There 
are, of course, classics for all years; children's, 
youth's, and maturity's. It is the mark of them 
that through all years they never cease to be classics ; 
so that age still enjoys Aesop and Alice-in-Wonder- 
land possibly more keenly even than does childhood. 
In regard to my second rule I feel that more 
ought to be said. Lowell advised Howells, when 
the latter was a young author: "Read what will 
make you think; not what will make you dream." 
This is the essence of reader's wisdom. There 
must always be some effort in attaining new ideas if 
they are really to become incorporated in the body 
of the reader's thought. The very idea of books 
is to give a kind of short-cut experience of those 
parts of the world which are too remote in time or 
space or in the dimensions of thought to be lived 
through by everyone. In the world of books we 
are led through innumerable worlds which could 
never otherwise be ours. If we would have the full 
benefit of the adventure it must be a bit strenuous 
— like all real living. All of which means that the 
reader ought not perpetually to be renewing his ac- 
quaintance with the familiar; but that he should al- 
ways be adventuring into the unknown in the realm 
of ideas. Reading ought surely to be pleasant, but 
it ought quite as surely to call for stout effort and 



60 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

Stiff thinking; it should never (in school) be mere 
pastime. I say this rather from a university than 
a grade-school standpoint ; for many a time students 
have complained to me of the difficulty of reading 
assignments (unfamiliar words, elusive concep- 
tions), as if it were the business of books merely 
to remind them of what they already know and in 
words with which they are familiar. But surely 
no student ought to come to the university with any 
such preconception; the grade schools should see 
to that. 

My third rule — that reading should be free and 
extensive — is the most important of all. From the 
sixth grade upwards, as I guess, there is little need 
for formal and detailed study of texts in one's own 
language, while there is every need for the encour- 
agement of free reading. This means a library and 
the time to use it. Fortunately, no school need be 
without a library sufficient to any good school's 
needs. Books were never cheaper than they are to- 
day, and the best books are the cheapest. I am 
thinking of such collections of the world's best 
books as Everyman's Library, as the Oxford clas- 
sics, or as ex-President Elliot's five feet of Harvard 
classics — all readable and handy, all easily obtainable 
and at small expense, and all of them books worth 
the reading. Give the school boy the run of them, 
and the growth of his taste need occasion the 
teacher no worry. 

But, you will be asking, is there not to be detailed 



THE HUMANITIES 61 

class analysis of the great monuments of our litera- 
ture, especially in the upper grades? Shakespeare, 
for example. Now it goes without saying that 
Shakespeare should be a part of the acquisition of 
every English-speaking school child. But for my 
part, I can see no good reason for devoting school 
room time to poring over his texts — a play to the 
term. It is far better that the student should read 
all of Shakespeare even with little understanding 
than that he should know two or three plays, as, 
alas ! sometimes proves, ad nauseam. It is not par- 
ticularly important if he make mistakes of interpre- 
tation or miss half the points ; for Shakespeare hap- 
pens to be the sort of a writer whose books last, 
whose meaning inevitably grows with the re-read- 
ing. Indeed, it is a poor book that is exhausted in 
a single reading, or that is completely understood 
in any one period of life. A book ought not to be 
comprehended at the outset; it is enough if it arouse 
the kind of interest which will bring the reader back 
to it again and again as life passes Courses in lit- 
erature, in history, in philosophy, all should encour- 
age wide reading, which in the long run is the only 
source for true comprehension and the only founda- 
tion for a sure taste. 

In all this I have been speaking apart from the 
question of the study of foreign tongues. But this 
has been in order that I might first of all make the 
meaning and end of such study clear. For from 
the point of view of liberal education we study for- 



62 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

eign languages in order that we may make the ac- 
quaintance of their literatures. As I have said, the 
study of literature is the study of European litera- 
ture of which English is only a fragment. Not all 
European languages that have literatures can be 
taught in the schools ; but not all are equally import- 
ant, and the most important can and should be 
taught. English is first, grammar and syntax along 
with literature; but English should be able to take 
care of itself, almost subconsciously, after the first 
good start. When, therefore, the schoolboy has 
reached the place where he will read for himself in 
his mother-tongue, it is time that he begin the study 
of one of the other languages which are the instru- 
ments of our civilization and the keys to the mean- 
ing of history — a stage which I should suppose 
would be reached in the seventh or eighth grade, 
and certainly ought not be later than the ninth. 

And what should be the first language studied? 
Well, I am enough of a fogy to say unhesitatingly 
that it should be Latin. There are a number of rea- 
sons for this choice. First, Latin is the key to more 
centuries of the world's history, and, on the whole, 
to a greater range of literature (historical and polit- 
ical as well as imaginative) than is any other lan- 
guage. Second, Latin is a key to the understanding 
of fundamental English, for the majority of our 
words and forms of expression are directly or in- 
directly of Latin origin. Third — and by no means 
least — Latin is the best taught of languages, a sin- 



THE HUMANITIES 63 

gle year of it giving far more in the way of returns 
than is to be obtained from the study of any other 
foreign tongue. Of modern languages I regard 
French in form and habit, as nearer to EngHsh than 
is any other language, while French literature is far 
the most important modern literature other than 
our own. Further, it is so intimately connected 
with the English that the two may almost to be said 
to form one great literature. Greek among ancient 
and German among modern languages are second 
in importance to Latin and French, and should 
surely be made accessible in high school for all stu- 
dents having linguistic gifts or literary enthusiasms. 
But whatever the language studied, it should never 
be forgotten that, if it be in the interests of liberal 
education, the study is pursued for the sake of liter- 
ature, of the litter ae humaniores. If we study 
Latin or Greek it is for reading the very words of 
the great classical authors; if we study French or 
German or English itself (and English demands 
hard study for its real mastery), it is in order that 
we may read French and German and English lit- 
erature. We should not teach language for the 
sake of "discipline," far less for the sake of philol- 
ogy, but only for the sake of making readers. But 
we should remember that in making readers we are 
giving the best gift that education can give, and 
performing its highest service to the state ; for it is 
books that transmit civilization and it is the freedom 
of printed speech that preserves the state. 



LETTER VII. 
HISTORY 

IF letters and numbers are the tools of a liberal 
education, the structure of the edifice is surely 
history. Human civilization is not a thing that is 
created anew in each generation; it is a bequest, a 
heritage, handed on from the generations of the 
past, and accumulating with generations. Further, 
it is by no means transmitted automatically nor 
without loss; rather, its continuance depends upon 
conscious effort, the effort of teachers, and upon 
wise selection of what shall be taught. Each suc- 
ceeding generation of men — if they are to continue 
the work of civilization — must have been initiated, 
as it were, into its mysteries by the men of the pre- 
ceding generation, and the initiating officers are the 
teachers. Not all the experience of any single gen- 
eration can be handed on to its successors, but only 
the most valuable and significant of its experiences, 
selected out from the whole. It is such selected ex- 
periences, accumulating with the years, that consti- 
tute history, and it is these which make possible the 
culture that separates the civilized man from the un- 
taught savage. 

Knowledge of history is the preserver of civiliza- 

65 



66 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

tion. This being true it is obviously of the first im- 
portance that history be thoroughly and wisely 
taught in the public schobls. It should be clear that 
history, in the scope in which I am conceiving it, is 
not the record of any one particular form of human 
activity. It is not (as many of us might think first 
off) merely the records of the political activities of 
men — of the rise and fall of nations and states, with 
the recounting of their battles and the roll of their 
passing monarchs. Neither is it merely this with 
the addition of the social and economic changes 
which influence the destinies of peoples. It includes 
all these as necessary parts, and in particular na- 
tional and dynastic records form the frame or guide 
with reference to which other facts are given orient- 
ation in time. But history in its full and signifi- 
cant sense comprises the total record of human 
achievements in all the great fields. It comprises 
along with the story of political changes and the 
record of the spread of the races of mankind over 
the globe, the history of the growth of ideas in reli- 
gion and philosophy and literature, the history of 
discovery in science, the history of invention in art 
and industry. Religion, letters, art, science, indus- 
try, — all these represent the superstructure of civil- 
ization, the development of which is made possible 
(in the higher forms) by political and economic or- 
ganization. It is mainly these activities which give 
the value of life. They are, therefore, justly re- 
garded as the measures of civilization; and it is ob- 



HISTORY 67 

vious that if the aim of the schools be the preserva- 
tion and enlargement of the gifts of civilization, no 
teaching can be more important than is that which 
strives to make of our citizens qualified judges of 
these higher forms of human activity. Knowledge 
of the history of culture — that is, of the develop- 
ment of ideal interests as well as of the course of 
human events — is thus the completed end of liberal 
education. 

Necessarily, there must be a starting-point in the 
inculcation of such a vast body of knowledge; and 
this, without doubt, should be the history of the 
races and nations of mankind. There must be, first 
of all, a conception of the beginnings of things hu- 
man and of the im.portance of ''before and after" in 
the arrangement of events. Personally I am an ar- 
rant rebel against the so-called recapitulation the- 
ory as applied to pedagogy, — that is, the notion that 
every child, in the course of his education, must run 
the gamut of experiences marking the progress of 
the race upward from savagery. But I think we 
may take this one lesson from the untutored child 
of nature, — namely, that a myth of the beginnings 
of things is the natural introduction to a conception 
of history. For it is true that savage peoples have 
such myths long before they dream of counting 
their genealogies or telling over the count of their 
tribal chieftains. Luckily, there are many excellent 
school readers which tell the story of ancient man, 
as he was in the dawn of history; and I suppose 



68 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

that the great body of folklore tales of giants and 
heroes and princesses and the like, who lived "once 
upon a time" or "long, long ago," give as good an 
introduction as one need ask for to the conception 
of changing times and passing events. Certainly no 
child should be deprived of them. 

Let us suppose, then, this introduction, as belong- 
ing to the primary grade. The next step — and it 
can hardly be emphasized too clearly — is to impart 
the chronological form of history, the "time-form," 
by means of which the "before and after" of events 
is shown in detail. I think I can best illustrate 
what I mean by reference to a well-known psycho- 
logical phenomenon. A considerable per cent of 
those who learn numbers acquire, with their first 
knowledge of the notation, what is called a "num- 
ber-form." The number-form is an imaginary 
spatial arrangement, a picture or mental diagram, of 
the integers in their natural successions. Often 
such number-forms begin with a circle, the numbers 
1 to 10 running about it clockwise (showing the in- 
fluence of the dial of the clock, but modified by the 
power of the decimal idea), while the higher num- 
bers, first in tens, and then in hundreds, run off into 
space at all sorts of tangents and angles. A person 
who acquires such a number-form (quite uncon- 
sciously) in childhood is virtually certain to carry 
it through life. Now a chronological time-form is 
very similar. It also is organized according to the 
decimal system, into decades and centuries and mil- 



HISTORY 



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70 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

lenia, and it has a middle position, or era, with re- 
spect to which all the balance is organized. It is 
simple, to be sure, in its structure; but it is not so 
simple that it need not be taught, for (I speak from 
experience) it is altogether easy to find in a group 
of university students not a few who are unable 
to define "the Christian Era" with any accuracy, 
who have only hazy understandings of '*B. C." and 
'*A. D." or who fail wholly in attempts to charac- 
terize even the greater periods of history, in their 
time perspective. We are all familiar with the mis- 
chief wrought to a child's geographical understand- 
ing by the distortions of map projections; only a 
globe can set him at rights. The same thing is true 
with respect to the time perspective : its general 
form, with the Christian Era forming a kind of his- 
torian's equator, must be in his mind in order that 
the student shall correctly place the items of his 
growing historical knowledge. The whole signifi- 
cance of history is, indeed, dependent upon the order 
of events in time; and the student who cannot tell 
what is first and what is second, what is before and 
what after, misses the conception of historical 
growth and casuality. In short, what the multipli- 
cation tables are to arithmetic or the axioms to 
geometry, the time-form is to the study of history. 
Of course a chronology- form is not a thing to be 
memorized direct in all its elaborations, — which are 
indeed complex when taken in connection with the 
history of mankind over all the globe. Rather it 



HISTORY 71 

must be built up, in connection with definite con- 
tents, like an arithmetical number-form. Probably, 
the best method is to approach it from both ends — 
the modern history of one's own country and an- 
cient history — at the same time. The history of 
one's own land can be made elementary because of 
its familiar nearness ; ancient history is easy because 
of its relative simphcity (partly due to our meager 
knowledge, partly to its restricted character), and 
because of its association with the Bible, which is 
the key to our chronological system. Ancient his- 
tory, moreover, is better capable of being shown as 
a history of culture in all its variety, than is mod- 
ern, — I mean for elementary courses. It is not the 
politics of Egypt or of Greece that appeals to the 
imagination so much as the art and the modes of 
life; and all these are simpler in form and more 
obvious in gradation than in later centuries. One 
might almost take ancient architecture as the index 
of the quality of the whole; it is readily intelligible 
because of the simplicity and symmetry of its mem- 
bers, and it serves as a kind of progressive symbol- 
ization of progress, — from the childish, even if 
huge, pyramids and enclosed temples of Egypt to 
the open colonades of the Greek and the arches of 
the Roman civic edifices, as it were framed to ad- 
m.it the spirit of freedom and democracy along with 
the light of day into the abodes of men. 

At the other extreme, American history is begun 
naturally and vividly with the tales and incidents 



n LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

that stir patriotic idealism and explain the great na- 
tional festivals. But its study leads inevitably and 
early beyond the boundaries of America, back to the 
Old World, whence our fathers came; and from 
Britain on to the Continent, and from our own 
country back through the centuries of the history of 
western Europe. There is probably in all human 
history no great episode so broadly unified as is the 
development of Catholic Christendom out of the 
ruins of the Roman Empire. It is from this devel- 
opment, either directly or through the reaction of 
the Reformation, that all modern western nations 
take their rise and get their color and temper; and 
it ought to be the easiest of tasks to impress upon 
the mind of a child who has already grasped the 
great central fact of the Christian Era the general 
form of the development, which through mediaeval 
Christendom, leads from Imperial Rome on into 
democratical America. Having grasped this fact, 
he will — I venture to say — have acquired the funda- 
mental key to the understanding of our civilization 
and of our ideals, political, social, and religious. 

For it must be remembered that American history 
and American institutions (like all other objects of 
knowledge) can never be understood in isolation. 
We can only understand what we are in seeing 
clearly what we are not ; and in particular in seeing 
what we have grown out of being. It is for this 
reason that American history should lead inevitably 
into English history, and English into west Euro- 
pean, and west European into Roman history, — 



HISTORY 73 

where the connection is naturally made with the an- 
cient Mediterranean history, of Egypt, Judea, 
Greece, in which our civilization has its remote 
roots. So much of history, — at least so much, — 
should be mastered in its broad outlines by every 
youth who leaves the high school (and I am tempted 
to say, by every youngster through with the 
grades) ; for it is fully as important that he have 
this general background into which to fit the facts 
which his later knowledge will bring, as it is that he 
should have a clear conception of the globe and its 
continents as a foundation for fuller geographical 
and physiographical knowledge. Time-form and 
space- form are alike fundamental, if the world is to 
be understood, or the affairs of life wisely judged. 
But I must repeat what I said in the beginning. 
History is not merely political history — nor merely 
economic, for nowadays there is an unfortunate and 
untrue stress laid upon what is called "the economic 
interpretation of history." History is rather a 
complex of the development of all human interests. 
All the great interests — industry, art, science, let- 
ters, philosophy, religion, — are not only manifesta- 
tions of human progress, they are also causes of 
human progress. My own special field of study is 
the history of philosophy, that is the history of 
men's abstract thinking about the meaning of human 
life; and for the later history of mankind, from the 
Greeks onward, I am certain that a very clear case 
might be made for the domination of ideas, as 
causes of progress and as the true interpreters of 



74 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

history. It was ideas, for example, that led to the 
Crusades, that led to the discovery of America, and 
in large part to its settling; it was ideas, again, — 
the great ideas expressed in the Declaration of In- 
dependence — that brought about our Revolution and 
the establishment of the United States as a free na- 
tion ; and it is ideas and an ideal of justice and hu- 
manity that have plunged us whole-heartedly into 
the great European struggle — now, indeed, a world 
struggle. Ideas and ideals, in art, science, religion, 
letters, are of tremendous importance in human af- 
fairs. Comprehension of them is the beginning of 
all political wisdom. Comprehension of them is 
also the surest safeguard of democratical rights, and 
the true seed of patriotism. It is certain as day, 
therefore, that a schooling which fails in giving to 
the growing generation the fullest knowledge of 
histor}^ in all its bearings, which it is capable of 
giving is traitorous to its duties. Men must be able 
intelligently to survey the past of mankind, in order 
to comprehend the present, in order to look forward 
to a wisely prepared future. Hence it is that after 
the tools of learning are mastered, the study of his- 
tory should be made the core of the curriculum, to 
be pursued without interruption from the child's 
first tales of Washington and Lincoln to the college 
senior's study of the history of philosophy. Even 
then the subject will but have received an introduc- 
tion, so vast is its scope. Fortunately, history is the 
easiest of all subjects to carry forward when school- 
days are past — the easiest and the most important. 



LETTER VIII. 
THE BIBLE IN THE SCHOOLS 

IN my last letters I discussed the place of the hu- 
manities and of history in the public school cur- 
riculum. In the letter which I now write I propose 
to discuss a topic immediately related to these, and 
that is the place of the study of the Bible in the pub- 
lic schools. 

This matter is immediately related to the study 
of the humanities and of history, first of all, because 
it is a part of such study. The Old Testament is 
the literature — historical, poetical, and philosoph- 
ical — of an ancient nation having in antiquity more 
than a thousand years of recorded history, and a na- 
tion which has been second to none in its influence 
upon the subsequent history of the western world. 
That its influence, like that of the Greeks, has been 
exclusively in the domain of ideas and ideal influ- 
ences but renders the more patent the necessity, 
which every person who can pretend to historical 
learning must recognize, of an intimate acquaintance 
with its literature. The two great sources of ideas 
at the foundation of European civilization are the 
Greek and the Hebrew ; the thought and experience 
of both of these ancient peoples is still Hving and 

75 



Id LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

vital in our society, in the one case in art, philos- 
ophy, and science, in the other in religion and in the 
interpretation of history. Obviously, he who would 
understand the modern world must be familiar with 
its great beginnings in the literatures and records 
of these ancient peoples. 

Of course the Old Testament cannot be separated 
from the New, in this consideration. Nor is there 
any reason why it should be so; for every reason 
which can be urged for an acquaintance with the 
Old Testament applies equally to the New; from 
any point of view it is a book of profound signifi- 
cance in the development of the thought of the 
western world. The very fact that we mark our 
era and tell our time with reference to events nar- 
rated in the New Testament indicates the tremend- 
ous significance which these events have for our 
imaginations and for our interpretations of human 
life. Indeed, as I indicated in my last letter, the 
first lesson which a child must learn, who would be 
at all instructed in history, is the meaning of the 
Christian Era ; and again as I indicated, the readiest 
and best approach to a comprehension of history is 
through the chronological arrangement of Biblical 
events as formulated in theological tradition — such 
an arrangement as is given by Archbishop Ussher, 
and was indicated in the "time-form of European 
history" which accompanied my last letter. This, 
I say, is easy to impress upon a child's mind, both 
because of its simplicity of form and because of its 



THE BIBLE IN THE SCHOOLS 11 

dramatic appeal; for we should not overlook the 
fact that the Bible, in spite of its being a collection 
of books composed through a series of centuries, has 
none the less in its organization and scope the form 
of a great drama of history and of the world, and 
is in this sense alone the most stupendous co-ordina- 
tion of ideas yet achieved by mankind. Milton's 
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained — surely the 
noblest poems in the English language — are an in- 
terpretation of this Biblical drama of the world, 
which in the course of centuries has become so deep- 
seated in the European mind that it colors all forms 
of speculation: politics, history, geology, astron- 
omy, to say nothing of art and literature, have been 
and are influenced beyond count by Biblical ideas. 
It goes without saying, therefore, that knowledge of 
these ideas is a pre-requisite to an understanding 
of ourselves. 

But it is not merely for its historical significance, 
fundamental as this is, that the study of the Bible 
is important from a public school point of view. It 
must also be regarded as a great and moving record 
of human experience, and of experiences which 
time has shown to possess the most profound power 
to mould the sentiments of mankind. In this sense 
the Bible is not only to be reckoned among the hu- 
manities, but it is by all odds the foremost of the 
humanities. No one can for a moment question it's 
pre-eminence among the ideal forces which have 
gone to the making of the mental attitudes of men 



78 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

of the present day. Here again we come to the 
final issue of education; namely, the comprehension 
of human nature in its subtlest and most enduring 
interests, to the end that we may be able to live the 
lives of self-comprehending men, and therefore of 
self-responsible citizens. Such comprehension de- 
mands perspective, and in particular it demands the 
power to enter imaginatively into the great move- 
ments of the past, which have been profound de- 
terminants of later conduct. If the Bible contained 
no more than the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles of the 
New Testament, it would still be incomparably the 
most significant of our records out of the past; for 
in these tracts (which is what first they were), we 
have the picture of the greatest ideal movement 
which has ever influenced mankind — a movement 
which made its century the first of our era, and 
without rival the most striking century in the whole 
story of human progress. This judgment I believe 
must be confirmed by every student of human his- 
tory, no matter what his views as to the final inter- 
pretation of the Scriptures. 

Reasons such as I have given make it certain that 
the Bible is a proper subject for school instruction. 
It is of first order in intrinsic significance, and other 
subjects, both scientific and historical, cannot be 
fully understood apart from Biblical knowledge. 
But there are yet other considerations which em- 
phasize this importance of the book. I refer to its 



THE BIBLE IN THE SCHOOLS 79 

contemporary meaning in intellectual and religious 
experience. 

The first of these, the intellectual, apart from 
the historical and humanitarian values which I have 
already discussed, is a literary value. As literature 
the Bible is a very extraordinary book, most extra- 
ordinary, I think, from the fact that in the long run 
it has been more influential in translations than in 
the original texts. In English, for example, there 
is no book by a native author, not even Shakespeare 
which has had so profound an influence, not only 
upon the thought of English-speaking peoples but 
upon the style and quality of the language itself, 
as has the King James version of the Bible. The 
imagery and diction of this version are so charac- 
teristic that we regard its style as the finest model 
we possess for simple and forceful as well as for 
noble discourse. Moreover, many books and pas- 
sages of the Bible are themselves examples of sub- 
limity not only in matters of style, but in that union 
of exalted style with exalted thought which Lon- 
ginus regards as the supreme achievement of litera- 
ture; nor is it without thought that Longinus — 
though a pagan himself — cites the beginning of 
Genesis as a high example of sublimity. Similarly, 
Watts-Dunton, the British poet and critic, speaks 
of the Biblical psalm as constituting a special form 
of the lyric poem, which he terms "the Great Lyric" 
and which he places alongside of the tragic drama 



80 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

and epic poem as supreme among the forms of hu- 
man literary expression. 

The Bible is, of course, the most read book in the 
world. It is also the most edited and translated. 
In the English-speaking world familiarity with the 
authorized version is all that is strictly to be de- 
manded of a man of culture and all that the schools 
need take greatly into account. Nevertheless, there 
is another version of the Bible which ought to some 
extent be known, especially by persons who make 
literature an important part of their study. This 
is the Latin Vulgate, the style of which not only 
served as the model for the English of the author- 
ized version, but has in innumerable ways affected 
the development of literary expression. There is, 
indeed, a whole field of profoundly moving Latin 
literature, the Latin literature of the church of the 
Middle Ages, to which the Vulgate is the natural in- 
troduction; and it is my own opinion that, in the 
university at least, this field and type of Latin (for 
the style is as distinctive as is Biblical English) 
ought to be given a position little short of that ac- 
corded to classical Latin. Certainly, here is an- 
other reason for the stressing of the study of the 
classical languages; for Latin is the tongue of one 
of the greatest fields of European literature, the 
Christian literature of the church, while Greek is, of 
course, the original language of the New Testament 
and of the Septuagint version of the Old. It has 
been the habit of educators to regard knowledge of 



THE BIBLE IN THE SCHOOLS 81 

these as necessary only in the case of clergymen and 
theologians, but this is certainly an erroneous view 
so far, at least, as the Vulgate Bible is concerned; 
its phrases re-echo throughout the whole range of 
the European literature of our era. 

But what of the Bible as a religious book? Dare 
the schools tamper with the great source of religious 
instruction more or less jealously interpreted by the 
many groups of Christian sectaries? The question 
is certainly a delicate one; it has been and is the 
cause of the gingerly fashion in which the public 
schools approach instruction in Biblical learning. 
Nevertheless, it seems to me that it is by no means 
an insoluble problem. Knowledge of the Bible is 
a vastly important factor in a sound liberal educa- 
tion; this is undeniable, and it is this fact which 
makes the duty of the schools to offer instruction 
in this as in other liberal branches obvious. Granted 
the duty, the tactful means should be discoverable. 
It is surely an anomaly that we have numbers of pri- 
vate schools supported along with our public schools 
to give this form of instruction, which the parents 
of the children who attend these private schools 
rightfully regard as important. 

Possibly if we call to mind the circumstances 
which have induced the present attitude of the pub- 
lic schools with respect to this subject, we may be 
in a better position to pass judgment upon sound 
policy. These circumstances go far back in the his- 
tory of our education, finding their roots in the two 



82 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

great cultural movements which introduced what 
we call the modern period of western history. I 
refer to the Renaissance and the Reformation. On 
the side of book-learning, the Renaissance was 
marked first and essentially by its tremendous in- 
terest in the pagan classics of Greece and Rome. 
In the Middle Ages the universities had given no 
instruction in the pagan humanities, and had, in- 
deed, in particular frowned upon a too close ac- 
quaitance with the writings of the pagan poets. 
Theology, philosophy, and poetry all had their ec- 
clesiastical forms distinct in spirit and form from 
the classics. But the Renaissance humanists were 
immensely taken with the rediscovered monuments 
of pagan literature ; they developed, indeed, a verit- 
able cult of these "humanities" (as distinguished 
from theological studies), and out of this enthu- 
siasm grew the modern academic "classical" educa- 
tion, stressing pagan and avoiding Christian cul- 
ture. To a not inconsiderable degree the Renais- 
sance reaction against the mediaeval schools is the 
source of our modern liberal arts college ; and since 
the liberalism of the college is reflected in the sec- 
ondary schools, the whole tendency of the Renais- 
sance spirit has been to secularize educational ideals 
— leaving, of course, the matter of religious (and 
Biblical) instruction in the hands of the churches. 
The Reformation raised still another issue. The 
mediaeval church had been eminently political and 
in general international. With the Reformation 



THE BIBLE IN THE SCHOOLS 83 

came the rupture of Protestant and Catholic and at 
the same time the establishment of national 
churches. The conflict of church and state which 
grew out of these movements has had various 
forms: the form of the antagonism of Protestant 
nations, with their own national churches against 
Catholic internationalism; the conflict of Protestant 
sects, not officially recognized with the established 
churches, and finally the conflict of the political pub- 
lics of various nations (including our own at its 
foundation) with the whole idea of poHtically rec- 
ognized religious bodies. These varied conflicts, 
which in some countries are still undetermined, have 
given rise to a general modern sentiment, especially 
in the democratic nations, that the political society 
should be tolerant of all denominations and should 
favor none; and hence to a general conviction that 
public school instruction should be, as it were, neu- 
tral in all matters touching religion. It is this feel- 
ing, indeed, which has had most to do with the dis- 
couraging of Bible study in the public schools of 
the United States. 

But it is obvious that these influences, both of 
the Renaissance and of the Reformation, are not 
vital in our country and time; they belong to the 
Old World and to former centuries. The United 
States has nothing to fear politically from eccle- 
siasticism within its borders, while the academic 
tradition with respect to the classics is already tre- 
mendously weakened by the broadening of modern 



84 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

curricula. Indeed, teachers of the classics should 
gladly welcome such an added incentive to their cul- 
tivation as is afforded by interest in the Christian 
Latin literature. When such supreme poets as the 
Catholic Dante and the Protestant Milton can be 
comprehended only by a combined knowledge of the 
Bible and the pagan classics it is clear that the hu- 
manist cannot dispense with either source. 

The final matter is purely one of method. How 
should Bible study be handled in the public schools ? 
The answer can only come in full from trial, but 1 
think I can point to at least two lines of approach 
at once important, easy and beyond criticism. The 
first of these is the historical, which I have already 
mentioned. Biblical history should be taught as a 
part of ancient history and as a clue to the under- 
standing of all history. This is in part done al- 
ready in school text-books in ancient history, but 
these text-books are rarely brought into connection 
with the Biblical narratives, a task which every 
teacher of school history should see through, if for 
no other reason than to keep the mind of the young 
from an utter confusion, and from what sometimes 
happens, a contempt for the historical value of the 
Bible itself. If the book were used for what it cer- 
tainly is, one of the most important of all our 
sources of knowledge of ancient history, it could 
hardly fail to command an attention and respect 
which too many of us can testify is now wanting. 

My second suggestion has to do with the use of 



THE BIBLE IN THE SCHOOLS 85 

the Biblical text itself. The telling of Bible stories 
to the young in other than the language of the Bible 
seems to me a waste and a wrong. It is a waste 
because the text is already a classic of the highest 
order, and needs only the custom of hearing in order 
to be understood even by the very young. It is a 
wrong because it should be a part of the educational 
birthright of every English-speaking child to be- 
come intimate with the style and form of the au- 
thorized version of King James, which, as Cardinal 
Newman, himself a Catholic, has said, can never be 
replaced in the affections of the English-speaking 
world by any other version. 

If each teacher in the grade schools were to make 
it a custom to read daily chapters or passages of the 
authorized version to the school, omitting comment, 
I cannot perceive that public objection could attach 
to the custom, while, in the way of gain, not a child 
who had passed through a series of years under the 
influence of such readings but would have acquired 
ineradicable impressions of the highest value for 
the development of both his intellectual and his 
moral character. 



LETTER IX. 

NATURE AND SCIENCE 

WHAT is called "nature study" at the primary 
end and "the natural sciences" at the uni- 
versity end of a school career forms a group of sub- 
jects which in matter and manner stand in conscious 
contrast with the humanities. The humanities are 
concerned with men, their affairs, ideas, expression; 
the study of nature is concerned with those condi- 
tions under which men live that are beyond human 
power to create — with the whole environment of 
life, in short, with the physical world. History is 
the center and frame of the humanities; cos- 
mology, the architecture of the universe, is the cen- 
ter and frame of the study of nature. The two 
groups of studies are thus contrasting and com- 
plementary ; one might well put it, that the study of 
nature and the sciences gives the staging and scen- 
ery, the study of the humanities gives the action of 
the drama of life. Neither is dispensable to a true 
enlightenment. 

The great purpose of the study of nature is to 
give the setting of life. It must give a conception 
of the form of the heavens and of the movements 
of the stars, and of the sun and earth, and of the 

87 



88 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

changing hours of the day and seasons of the year; 
and this we call astronomy. It must give a concep- 
tion of the structure and formation of the earth on 
which we dwell, zone and clime, sea and continent; 
and this we call geology and geography. It must 
give an understanding of the forms of movement, 
molar and molecular, and of all the varied energies 
which appear to us as material things and phenom- 
ena; and this we call mechanical, physical, chemical 
science. It must also give an understanding of the 
development, variety, and activities of living beings, 
vegetal and animal; and this is biological science, 
with botany and zoology as its fundamental divi- 
sions, and many special branches — morphological, 
physiological, pathological — dealing with particular 
phases of the complex whole. Finally, the scientific 
study of nature includes the study of man himself as 
an animal and as a social being — for man, too, is a 
part of the furniture of creation; and here we have 
the anthropological and psychological sciences, the 
political, economic, and social sciences. 

In the pursuit of studies chosen from so vast an 
array of subjects it is all too easy to become ab- 
sorbed in the details of special mastery at a cost of 
the loss of an understanding of what the general ob- 
jects of the study of nature should be. It is clear 
enough that the teaching of nature study and of the 
sciences can be intelligent only when these objects 
are understood by the teacher and made plain to the 
pupil. It becomes, therefore, the teacher's first 



NATURE AND SCIENCE 



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90 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

duty to keep their definition always in mind, as a 
kind of mental reservation guiding all instruction 
even if not explicit in it. 

These objects of the study of nature are in gen- 
eral represented by the distinction between "theoret- 
ical" and "applied" science — and there is not a sin- 
gle field of science which has not these two forms. 
Theoretical science is that which undertakes no 
more than to answer the questions put by our nat- 
ural human curiosity. "All men by nature desire 
to know," is the first sentence in Aristotle's Meta- 
physics, and it expresses a truth of human nature 
which the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowl- 
edge in Eden (for which, I imagine, none of us are 
profoundly sorry) is but another and allegorical ex- 
pression. As put in a more modern form, science 
is first of all an investigation into truth — truth for 
its own sake, irrespective of all desires or prefer- 
ences. This may be thrown into relation with the 
great fundamental fact that all theoretical science 
is interested in the discovery of law, and that the 
phrase "scientific law" has become for us the mod- 
ern substitute for an ancient notion of fate or ne- 
cessity. The laws of science — such as the great 
physical law of gravitation, or the great biological 
law of the evolution of life — are not at all "laws" 
in our human and legal sense of the word. Scien- 
tific laws are impartial statements of how natural 
forces operate, of how things act, whether these 
things be moving stars, blossoming plants, or flue- 



NATURE AND SCIENCE 91 

tuating prices on the stock exchange. Political and 
moral laws are imperative statements of how men 
ought to act under given circumstances. We 
"obey" scientific law only in the sense that there is 
no possible deviation from it; we "obey" civil and 
moral law only in a sense which implies possible 
disobedience. Furthermore, the fundamental aim 
of knowledge of natural law is knowledge of truth; 
it answers to an appetite for knowing and under- 
standing. The fundamental aim of civil law is at- 
tainment of the good; it answers to our hopes for 
the betterment of society. 

The first gift of the study of nature is, then, re- 
spect — nay, reverence, for the truth, irrespective of 
its effect upon us. It is in this sense that the study 
of nature and of the sciences is a liberalizing study, 
and a proper part of a liberal education. Of course, 
in last analysis, we believe the effect to be the good 
of society. It is good just because it develops a spe- 
cial attitude of mind which we call the "scientific 
attitude," and which is an attitude of impartiality 
and exactitude toward facts, and of an earnest de- 
sire to get at and understand all facts, and therefore 
of a love of truth in all things. And this attitude 
of fairness and truthfulness is of immense value to 
men in all their social relations. Who, for exam- 
ple, can imagine any attitude in a judge that would 
better serve justice than must a love of the truth? 
Or who can conceive a legislator better fitted for his 
task than by an ability to see facts and conditions 



92 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

impartially and impersonally? The "scientific at- 
titude" is of so enormous an importance to society 
that the greatest educational effort is justified in se- 
curing its development in the greatest possible num- 
ber of citizens; and it would be a negligent teacher 
of science, or of that ''nature study" which leads 
up to science, who could ever forget that his first 
and paramount purpose must be the cultivation of 
the love of truth and the power to perceive it. This 
is the corner-stone value of science to society, and 
therefore in education. 

What are called the "empirical method" and the 
"virtue of suspended judgment," or "scientific cau- 
tion," are all but special phases of the scientific at- 
titude, and all rest upon the fundamental fact of 
the love of truth. The empirical method means 
really nothing more than painstaking in the discov- 
ery of facts; suspended judgment means open- 
mindedness in the reading of facts, and a willing- 
ness to change one's mind. These, also, as anyone 
must recognize, are social virtues of the greatest 
value in human society — where men are all too 
ready to suspect one another's motives with- 
out due investigation. Indeed, one might say that 
just as the scientific love of truth is but a special 
cultivation of the virtue of honesty, so scientific 
caution is but a special cultivation of the virtue of 
generosity — and all that cultivates such virtues can- 
not but make for the good of society. 

Thus it is that while theoretical science does not 



NATURE AND SCIENCE 93 

aim directly at the good of society, indirectly it is of 
immense significance in the securing of the general 
good. ''Applied science," on the other hand, is the 
direct use of scientific truths for the social good. 
'^Applied science" means merely that knowledge ac- 
quired in the theoretical spirit is used in the secur- 
ing of desirable ends. A most obvious science of 
this sort is medicine, which has its theoretical aspect 
(as when the physician speaks of his patient as a 
"case"), but which is and is felt by most persons to 
be cultivated primarily for the healing of the sick. 
Not less obviously useful are engineering and agri- 
cultural science, in each case representing the appli- 
cation of facts discovered in the theoretical spirit to 
the needs and enterprises of men. In truth there is 
no science that has not its form of application ; even 
the astronomer's knowledge of stars measurelessly 
remote from earth is practically important in the ob- 
servations by means of which he regulates and syn- 
chronizes all the clocks that strike together, telling 
the hours of work and the hours of rest throughout 
the civilized world. Nay, the applications of 
science are so many and important that they are 
rather a menace to the teacher's and the student's 
understanding, than a help to it; and one of the se- 
rious problems which educators face at this hour is 
the quite inevitable tendency of all minds to empha- 
size the value of applied science to the clouding of 
their consciousness of the prior and greater import- 
ance of theoretical science. For unless the cultiva- 



94 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

tion of the "scientific attitude" be maintained in its 
purity, by the cultivation of theoretical science, the 
whole structure of scientific knowledge will inevit- 
ably degenerate into a series of specialized crafts or 
trades : the mechanic, the inventor, and the virtuoso 
will take the place of the investigator, and scientific 
discovery will be at an end. There is profound 
significance in the fact that in this present tremen- 
dous war the methods which the government of the 
United States is making most use of have been con- 
trived for it, not by specialist scientists of the great 
manufacturing plants, but by the theoretical scien- 
tists of our universities ; and when the history of the 
war is written no single class of men in the nation 
will be found to have done, I will not say more, but 
so much for the common cause, as have the trained 
university men. 

In so fully sketching the importance of the study 
of nature in education, I have allowed myself little 
space for a consideration of the method. But little 
space is needed if the fundamental fact be grasped 
that the teacher's first and constant task must be 
the cultivation of the virtues of the scientific atti- 
tude. 

As in the case of history, where a time-form is the 
elementary necessity, so in the case of nature study 
my own view is that a space-form is the elementary 
necessity. The first book I can remember being fas- 
cinated by (before I could read) was a little yellow- 
backed geography having for frontispiece a crude 



NATURE AND SCIENCE 95 

diagram of our solar system — sun, moon and earth 
— Jupiter with his sateHtes, Saturn with his rings. 
That gave me a space-form for my knowledge of na- 
ture — which has, I trust, grown with the years ; and 
I cannot imagine a better introduction. Nowadays 
teachers begin the study of geography with the 
schoolyard and town, and then go on to county, state, 
nation, and globe — like a sort of induction; and I do 
not quarrel with the method except when it is used 
alone. But just as in the study of history, we 
should begin not only with the near story of the 
United States but also with the remote one of an- 
cient history and the Biblical time-form, so in the 
study of nature we should unite with attention 
turned to the near environment an attention di- 
rected to the world as a whole. By and large, I be- 
lieve the most valuable single piece of apparatus a 
school can own is a good globe (or even a poor 
one). As the Greeks wisely saw, the circle and the 
sphere are the simplest of spatial ideas, and the be- 
ginning infant is already endowed with an under- 
standing that will enable him to grasp the notion 
that he lives upon a revolving ball, and that all celes- 
tial bodies move in gracious curves. 

In the advance, on through geography and ele- 
mentary astronomy to the story of the earth's for- 
mation and the classification of plant and animal life, 
the grades will have performed their necessary in- 
troduction to the more detailed work undertaken 
by the high school and college. Certainly, it should 



96 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

not be until the high school is reached that any em- 
phasis should be laid upon method — or the word it- 
self used. Children look outwardly and wonder- 
ingly at a vastly interesting world, and it could be 
only crime to call their attention to themselves — for 
the study of method is but a form of introspection. 
Nor should method ever (short of a post-graduate 
college) be made more important than the matter; 
there is an immense lot to be learned in the study 
of nature, and there need be but one rule in its in- 
culcation, and that is that it be taught sanely. My 
notion of sanity in nature study I have, I trust, 
made clear; it must be the constant and conscious 
preservation of a mind single upon the truth, seek- 
ing ever to conform to the good scientific rule of 
parsimony (not to use hypotheses beyond necessity) 
and to give, if naught else, a true comprehension to 
the meaning of law as applied to the world of na- 
ture's phenomena. 

There is, of course, also a humanistic phase to the 
study of science, and this is the study of the history 
of science, which is today rapidly coming forward 
as a university branch. Indeed, a most interesting 
theory of a ''new humanism" based primarily upon 
the history of science is advocated by George Sar- 
ton, in a recent number of Scientia, in which the au- 
thor would replace the ''old humanism" almost 
wholly by a study of scientific progress. This, it is 
needless for me to say, is going beyond reason. But 
I do believe, and have long believed, that the study 



NATURE AND SCIENCE 97 

of the history of science is one of the most valuable 
of the means open to a liberal training in the 
schools; and were I the organizer of college cur- 
ricula, I should place it in the first year of college 
work, encouraging students to enter into the special- 
ized and Hmited work of the laboratory courses only 
after they had made such a survey of the growth 
and meaning of the study of nature, in the history 
of mankind, as should serve to keep clear before 
them the great ends which this study should follow 
and the great benefits which it may bring to the state 
and to the ennoblement of human nature. 



LETTER X 
CRAFTS AND VOCATIONS 

IN several of the letters which I have written I 
have touched upon the 'Vocational" side of 
public school education, stating that vocational 
training should and must hold its place in our 
schooling, even if that place be properly but a sec- 
ondary one. I shall now try to make my view of 
this important matter clear. 

And to begin with, I would emphasize anew the 
fundamental fact that in a democratic government, 
such as ours, the first vocation of everyone is his 
citizenship. A democratic citizen is called upon, 
not merely to execute, but to judge public policies; 
and the power of judgment, which is the power of 
seeing things impersonally and impartially, with no 
side-glance at one's private interests, is the power 
which public education must first of all cultivate. 
This, I am convinced, can only be done by means 
of the education we call liberal — by means of the 
study of mathematics and literature, of history and 
science, pursued not as leading to a private profes- 
sion, but as leading to a public understanding. The 
liberal schooling is the vocational training of the 
citizen — of that capacity in a man by reason of 

99 



100 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

which he may even be called upon to condemn him- 
self (as Rousseau remarks) for the sake of the law 
— and without such training no democracy can long 
continue to be a democracy. "Vocational training," 
when it means, as so often it is taken to mean, the 
study of a craft or profession to the neglect of lib- 
eral culture, is proper enough in an aristocratic or 
autocratic form of government; but, pursued in 
this narrow fashion, it spells the ruin of democratic 
states. 

What, then, should be our attitude toward the 
technical elements in education and toward techni- 
cal schools ? How far are '^industrialism" and *'vo- 
cationalism" justified in state-supported, free educa- 
tion? In particular, what are the social and what 
are the private values in such training? 

As a first principle it may be laid down that free 
technical training by the state is justified only by its 
good to the state. The work of modern civilization 
is tremendously complex; it can be carried on and 
preserved only where there is present in society a 
large number of technicians. There must be physi- 
cians, lawyers, clergymen, commercial experts, en- 
gineers of a dozen varieties, trained agriculturists 
— and, indeed, specialists in things near and remote, 
from decipherers of cuneiform inscriptions to tea- 
tasters and parasitologists. All of these are neces- 
sary to the state; and to satisfy such necessities 
the state very properly provides the educational 
means. From the point of view of the public in- 



CRAFTS AND VOCATIONS 101 

terest it is, and should be, only accidental that this 
training works to the advantage of those who re- 
ceive the education; they are trained for the public 
service, not for their private welfares. This fact is 
of vast importance and ought to be made the guid- 
ing principle in all organization of vocational work. 

It is true that there is another type of public in- 
terest that is subserved by technical education, which 
falls in accord with private interest. I mean what 
is called the general welfare of a citizenry. A state, 
and in particular a democratic state, exists only for 
the welfare of its citizens, and no small part of this 
welfare is the mental comfort which comes of con- 
genial employment. When, therefore, a state is 
giving a boy with a taste for art or a gift for engi- 
neering the opportunity of cultivating his taste or 
gift, it is serving not only its own interests, in pro- 
ducing an artist or an engineer as a member of so- 
ciety, but it is serving its proper end in finding a 
congenial service for its citizen. The congeniality 
of the service will be reflected back in better effort, 
a heightened love of country, a happier life, — all 
tending to the common good. This, of course, is 
not distinctive of vocational education; it is a part 
of the gift of all education; but it is in opening the 
choice of a vocation to youth naturally endowed 
with ambition that it is most in evidence. 

Such are the public benefits of vocational school- 
ing ; the private benefits are also two in kind. There 
is, first, the "bread and butter" value — training 



102 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

for money-getting; expert knowledge or skill calls 
for unusual endowments and effort and it com- 
mands, as a rule, more than the average financial 
returns of labor. This is a fact so obvious that it 
needs no emphasis, and it is a fact far too often 
emphasized. For it is clearly but a selfish motive, 
in itself; and in matters of education, least of all, 
can we afford to lay stress upon appeals to self- 
interest. The vocational training is necessary to the 
state, and should be included in educational oppor- 
tunity; but every youth undertaking the mastery of 
a vocation should have it constantly impressed upon 
his mind that the object of the state, in giving him 
unusual opportunties, is to make him publicly serv- 
iceable, not privately wealthy. His debt is to the 
state ; and for all that he receives, above the oppor- 
tunity for practical service, he owes gratitude and 
the obligations of enlightened citizenship. 

In a second mode vocational training is of pri- 
vate benefit. Here I refer to the craftsmanship and 
technique given by the forms of special training. 
Hand and eye are made adept and co-ordinate at 
bench and forge. Powers of observation, delicacy 
of adjustment, sense of precision, all are cultivated 
by the laboratory. The library, I have said, is the 
core and support of liberal culture, for books open 
out to us .ranges of experience vastly beyond any- 
thing we can hope to traverse in the body. None 
the less, it is true that this experience must always 
be in essence imaginative; book knowledge moves 



CRAFTS AND VOCATIONS 103 

in a realm of ideas, of forms, which, however rich 
and broad, must always lack something of the 
reality of what we directly and bodily undergo. 
Training in craftsmanship and technique gives the 
necessary complement to the cultivation of the ideal 
powers, leading to readiness in bodily adaptation 
and quickness in sense-discrimination. The impor- 
tance of such training of hand and eye is very great; 
but it should not be overlooked that, compared with 
the mastery of books, it is a very simple problem. 
Life itself is a manual teacher for the normal human 
being, and it is certainly the rare child who does not 
get far more benefit from the rough-and-tumble 
world of out-of-doors than from all the shops of all 
the schools. The school shops give certain valu- 
able additions, and, in conjunction with the labo- 
ratory, a sound training in exactitude, but it is na- 
ture herself who gives the first instruction and last 
diploma in the active realm of experience. 

A clear perception that the proper benefits of vo- 
cational training are such as I have outlined, and 
that this training stands in such subordination to 
the liberal branches as I have indicated, is the safest 
guide to its right introduction into the curriculum. 
There is no question but that the average boy or girl 
has time, along with liberal studies, for a very thor- 
ough discipline in craftsmanship. Indeed, prop- 
erly handled, such discipline comes rather as a phase 
of sport than as a toil; for children are naturally 
drawn to tasks where muscles and sense are called 



104 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

into play. My notion — which I beHeve I mentioned 
in an earHer letter — is that the shop and laboratory 
end of the school plant ought to be open and busy 
at all hours of the day; and I hold to this because I 
cannot doubt that the mere presence of usable ap- 
paratus will act as a magnet to draw youthful ener- 
gies into activity. This is especially true in cities, 
where the youngster's opportunities for indepen- 
dent or unpoliced action are but too few and ill con- 
sidered. There is an eternal and invincible love of 
discovery and invention in the soul of youth, so 
that with a minimum of guidance children become 
naturalists and makers and artists. One need but 
supply the magnifying lens, the brushes, the tools, 
and give the privilege of their free use, and half 
the training is accomplished. 

On this foundation of the youngster's native 
eagerness for creative employment, the earlier 
phases of manual and technical work ought wholly 
to rest. The good which comes of trained hand 
and trained sense would thus come, and come nat- 
urally, with no thought of a special application. 
The practical understanding of wood-working, or 
mechanical and electrical contrivance, of gardening, 
of the in-door arts, all should find foundation in 
opportunities offered by the school, but taken to in 
a vacation spirit, with little thought of gradings and 
none of vocation. That such knowledge might be- 
come useful later on in life should safely be left to 
happy chance. 



CRAFTS AND VOCATIONS 105 

Indeed, no youth for whom Hfe holds the oppor- 
tunity for a complete education ought to be think- 
ing of vocation short of college years. Children 
surely must be taught to work, and youth to be in- 
dustrious, but this need not and should not mean the 
selection of a profession at the age of six or sixteen. 
The selection of a profession is a private and selfish 
concern, and youth, which all men agree to name 
generous, is no time for the emphasis of selfish in- 
terests. Rather, let each youngster be taught that 
the work of his time of life is the work of getting a 
general understanding of the structure and meaning 
of society as a whole, in all its history and all its 
problems, and that the state can allow him what- 
ever time he needs for the finding of his own appro- 
priate economic niche. I am no believer in short-cut 
courses to trades and professions; the years that 
appear to be saved by such devices are dearly bought 
by the society that provides them and by the indi- 
vidual who avails himself of them. "Speeding up" 
is no part of a sound education, and the teacher 
should be the last of men to urge the young to be 
thinking of time. 

"Vocationalism" is the noisest cry of our times 
in the educational world, and there is certainly no 
danger that the thing itself will be deprived of its 
proper place in the public schooling. But there is 
danger, indeed, a whole group of dangers, attend- 
ing its placing. The first of these is disproportion- 
ate and untimely emphasis of the importance of vo- 



106 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

cation in life. Society itself, the whole environment 
of an industrial and commercial world, sufficiently 
emphasizes this importance; and there is really no 
danger that young America will grow up to idle- 
ness; work is a part of our national genius. The 
teacher, therefore, and the schools, should be indul- 
gently skeptical of the boy's first ambitions, and 
never rush to set him in them ; he has plenty of time 
to change, and if he is a growing and energetic boy 
will change them many a time before his school days 
are at an end. Let him, if he must be a tradesman, 
be jack-of-all-trades, at least in boyhood; special- 
ization is only a form of slow suicide. 

Again there is the danger of distorted attitude. 
This comes from the teacher's side quite as much 
as from the pupil's, for it is the teacher who can 
and should keep clear before the pupil's mind his 
dignity as a citizen and his responsibilities as a citi- 
zen. I suspect that if even the kindergartner were 
to say to herself, if not to the small fry, when she 
greets her brood of a morning, "Fellow citizens!" 
— I suspect that her teaching would be philosophi- 
cally sounder and practically safer; I am sure that 
this is true of the upward stages. After six months 
of school I asked my eight-year-old what he had 
learned, what new thing, out of his schooling. With 
much deliberation : **Well, I've learned a new word, 
daddy." "What is it?" "Commerce." Commerce! 
It is a good and significant word; but I cannot but 
feel that it was an evil chance ( for I refuse to credit 



CRAFTS AND VOCATIONS 107 

it to the school) that gave him just this as the first 
meaning of education. 

Teachers, Hke the other members of the modern 
state, are by force of human Hmitation speciaHsts. 
As we pass on to high school and college, they be- 
come narrowed and differentiated to limited fields 
of learning and instruction. But teachers, most of 
all, should fight against the distortions of sanity 
which specialization brings in its train. For it is 
not only their own souls that are at stake, but the 
souls of the younger generations passing under their 
yearly influences. It is all too easy to see the im- 
portance of one's own field, and to make it supreme. 
It is hard, indeed, to maintain a level view of all 
the various activities that make up the round of 
human life. But the end which that view subserves 
is the preservation of the truth and vitahty of the 
democracy, and no effort can be too arduous when 
so great an end is in contemplation. 

I have said, once before, that education in a demo- 
cratic state is necessarily expensive. It is so just be- 
cause it must first of all be liberal. This does not 
mean that the vocation can be neglected; the com- 
plexities of civilization effectually prevent that. But 
it does mean that the vocation must be delayed, and 
that the educational period of life must not be looked 
upon (as too often it is) as but a preparation for 
life, a kind of trades apprenticeship. Rather it 
means that the life of youth and the years of school- 
ing must be viewed as citizens' work and as human 



108 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

right, and as in themselves an important addition 
to the meaning of the whole of life to the whole of 
society. But this topic is important ; it deserves an 
entire letter, and that shall be my next. 



LETTER XI 
THE LIFE OF YOUTH 

ONE of the aspects of public education which 
teachers, more than others, are apt to forget 
is that the schools do not exist solely for the sake 
of the formal instruction given in them. The cur- 
riculum bulks large in the school economy— that 
goes without saying; and all other activities must 
be organized around it; it represents school work, 
and its mastery the first measure of the school's 
efficiency. But still it ought not to be overlooked by 
teachers (as it is little likely to be by the exuberant 
youth) that the school years include time for much 
more than the formal work, or that there are school 
avocations along with the school vocation of study. 
We should remember, in short, that the word 
"school" itself harks back to a Greek word meaning 
"leisure" and that leisure, for all active and healthy 
human beings, signifies rtot" the opportunity for 
idleness, but the opportunity for self-initiated and 
self-directed activity. We may call this activity, 
play or sport or dreaming or invention, but wherever 
(as in all these things it does) it signifies physical 
or mental action of a spontaneous sort no sane judge 
of human nature can doubt that it is a part of a 

109 



110 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

hale and normal life, and no true teacher can wish 
for a school system which fails to recognize the 
right of these free activities along with the need 
for the disciplinary ones of the class room. 

The fact for first emphasis in our consciousness 
is that the school years represent a time of life — the 
one great time of life, we are prone to say as retro- 
spectively we survey it. There is a Puritanical cant 
in the not uncommon talk about education as form- 
ing ''a preparation for life" and of the school years 
ending in a ''commencement" — as if the pupil were 
indeed a pupa, hatching into an existence worth 
having only when his school days were at an end. 
Along with this goes the mature person's notion 
that he is ''supporting" the schools, as, in a sort, 
eleemosynary incubators of citizens. Both of these 
notions should be reversed. The infant in the pri- 
mary is already a citizen, doing citizen's work, and 
therein doing a part of his life work; his position 
in society is just as dignified and honest and profit- 
able as is that of merchant, farmer, mechanic, or 
judge, and he is entitled to entire respect for what 
he does. Your youngster has all the natural marks 
of homo sapiens; he is engaged in the proper duties 
of homo civilis; to him belong, therefore, the full 
rights of man and citizen, returns along with obli- 
gations. It is mere pedagogic Calvinism to look upon 
childhood as corrupted with some natural damnation 
which schooling must purify out; rather, the con- 
gregation of American citizenship has room for 



THE LIFE OF YOUTH 111 

every age and condition, and would be decrepit with- 
out all — and most decrepit were infancy rare. 

School years, then, represent citizens' life and 
school work is citizens' duty; and schools are no 
more public charities than are court houses or de- 
partment stores. We all know this, upon reflection, 
but we do not always talk as if we were bearing it 
in mind. And the consequences of bearing it in 
mind should be significant. First, they should keep 
— public and teacher alike — lively in consciousness 
the fact that the school child has rights of his own ; 
and second, the fact that it is not wholly yours to 
define these rights, that the child himself has some- 
thing to say about it. 

It is the second part of my proposition that is 
important in the saying ( for voices enough proclaim 
the rights of children). What I mean is this. 
Childhood and youth, as a life period, has its own 
desires and its own satisfactions, just as has any 
other period of life. Infants, for example, love 
rattles and gurglings and heels kicking the free air ; 
boys of ten are full of device, directed to the refor- 
mation of the world by the simple instrumentalities 
of jack knives, string, and chalk, and our back 3^ards 
are the scenes of many Utopias; their elders of 
fifteen or thereabouts, are fired by high imaginings 
to which their material environment offers but the 
most trivial response, so that they live in unseen 
politics, which we name their ambitions. We, their 
sedate elders (and note "sedate," from seder e, to 



112 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

sit), having heels weighted to earth, and having our 
own ideas about orderliness in the back yard, and 
having in the mill of experience, found more chaff 
than meal in our ambitions — we look back upon 
these affairs of younger years and dub them puerili- 
ties. Wisdom is ours, we say, and we propose to 
give the profit of it, willy-nilly, to the oncoming 
generation. 

This is wrong from both the youngster's point of 
view and our own. For he, in order that his soul 
may be his own, and that is to say in order that it 
may be a freeman's soul, must explore it for him- 
self, and very much in his own way. The variety 
that is in man is beyond measure wonderful, but 
like variety elsewhere in nature it must have oppor- 
tunity of unconstrained growth in order that its 
character and possibilities be made apparent. Gar- 
dening is a capital means for training and intensify- 
ing the known fruitfulness of known plants; but 
gardening, when the crop is exclusively in mind, 
bends to order and uniformity and trim compact- 
ness. Society, with its laws and fashions and insti- 
tutions, is all to the gardener's ideal ; it grows what 
it wishes and eradicates what it wishes (all within 
limits), and produces uniformity and order and 
like-mindedness of man with man. Certainly this 
must and should be the case if we are to have insti- 
tutional states and the thing we call civilization. 
But certainly, too, we must not overlook, in our 
anxiety to train aright, the complementary need for 



THE LIFE OF YOUTH 113 

the Spontaneous off-shooting of human ideals — orig- 
inaHty, invention, all that makes for that other 
thing we believe in, along with our belief in order 
and civilization, which we call human progress. Hu- 
man progress is always in the hands of the coming 
generation. It is always the outcome of some varia- 
tion in human appetite, and of some factor in which 
the younger contradicts the elder mind of man. This 
fact alone, should keep us loth to bind the fancy of 
youth beyond stringent necessity. 

Of course there is necessity for some restriction. 
I am not urging an unlimited indulgence, at home 
or in school. I have not forgotten (and, being a 
teacher, am little likely to forget) that study is the 
first duty of the schoolboy; that that duty is a social 
duty ; and that its observance is his good citizenship. 
I believe all this ; but I also believe that, outside the 
study hours — and there should be an ample outside 
— there should be encouragement of independence, 
there should be freedom from useless advice, and 
above all that the youngster has a right to his own 
spiritual privacy. Each man's soul is his own, we 
say — and we should mean this of man, female or 
male, youth or patriarch. Only so meaning can we 
be democrats in the one true and worthy sense — 
which is not that sense which would reduce all men 
to a level of likeness, like the eggs in an incubator, 
but that sense which would have an ever-living 
faith in the possibilities of human nature to discover 
human good. 



114 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

But I must distinguish. I have been making my 
convictions as to the right of youth to Hve his own 
Hfe,' in freedom and respect, the core of my letter. 
All along I have had a covert fear lest my reader 
should be confusing it with a pedagogic doctrine 
much in vogue nowadays for which I have only dis- 
trust. I refer to the extension of the biological 
phenomena of recapitulation, extended beyond 
embryology into a theory of conscious life. The 
development of the human embryo does indeed re- 
capitulate, as it were formally, certain striking fea- 
tures of animal evolution. But to apply the prin- 
ciple of this development to the whole conscious life 
of man, and in particular to the growth of mind 
from childhood through youth is overpowering ab- 
surdity. As ordinarily so expanded the theory takes 
the form of a conception of serially emerging in- 
stincts, each coming to a sudden and dangerous 
florescence, and each, upon its appearance, to be in- 
dulged and condoned and doctored until the stage 
of danger has been passed. In other words, the 
youth's instincts and aptitudes are looked upon 
about as are measles and mumps and other "chil- 
dren's diseases," as best met by exposure at the 
proper age and an immunizing recovery. In prac- 
tice the whole notion resolves into a theory of spe- 
cial license. Youth is to be given a permit to sow 
various crops of wild oats, with the idea that a 
properly indulged experience of savagery and what- 
not will bring an eventual absolution from con- 



■ i^4 



THE LIFE OF YOUTH 115 

tamination. I put the matter strongly because I 
have no call to dwell upon it; excepting to say that 
the older type of educational theory, which insisted 
that duty begins with even childish understandings, 
is far healthier and saner and everlastingly truer to 
human nature. My own theory, that the child is a 
citizen, is akin to the older theory; for citizenship 
always implies duties. It involves rights, too, and 
I would yield to none in conceding to the youngster 
what rightfully belongs to his years. But the in- 
telligent granting of such rights can never be based 
upon a notion of license, such as the recapitulation 
theory has introduced into modern educational ideas. 
True citizenship rests upon the recognition of "fair 
play," and children themselves are ever showing 
us how vivid the idea of fair play is with them. 
This is their certificate of humanity, and gives the 
lasting lie to the notion that they must live through 
a progressive animality in order to become men. 

But I have yet to make one important point. Chil- 
dren and youths have a right to live their own lives 
in their own way, subject (as all of us are subject) 
to the general restriction of good citizenship. With 
this right go duties, and I should say that of them all 
the youngster's first duty is the duty of happiness. 
I do not mean by this that he should be selfishly 
indulgent ; I do not mean that his own way should 
be the only way for him; nor do I mean that the 
pleasant and pleasures should be his ideal. But I 
do mean that in the social gift, the gift to the life of 



116 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

the state and to the morale of the community, which 
the Hfe of youth brings, the element of greatest im- 
mediate value is the cheery-mindedness of youth. 
There is naught more beautiful in the world than 
the brightness of childhood, at play upon the green, 
lost in imaginings, musical in spontaneous gaiety. 
So also with youth's elder years; all the world loves 
a lover, not because he is a lover, but because he is 
young; and the years of youth are the years of 
many charming loves, for the mind's emprize and 
the soul's courage as well as for the charms of body 
and the graces of expression which make so great 
a part of our world's illumination. Let us not ask 
that youth express itself as age expresses itself, nor 
that it be judged by the standards of sober years; 
for there would be but a drab life to be lived if the 
color and freshness of upspringing fancy were 
rooted out. Doubtless youth's joyousness possesses 
for us no tangible economic value; on the other 
hand, its freedom of privilege is a part of our ma- 
terial work to provide; but is there, in all that we 
do materially, a single endeavor which brings to 
life as a whole so much of unalloyed good as does 
the sunny beauty of the life of youth? 



LETTER XII 
POETRY AND PAGEANTRY 

IN my second letter, I think it was, I defined the 
gifts of a liberal education to be love of truth 
and of virtue and of beauty. If J did not remark 
in that connection it is perhaps occasion to do so now 
that these three loves are the essentially educable 
interests of man's nature. They are by no means 
the only human appetites and instincts; we possess 
many others, most or all of which we share with 
the balance of animal creation, and most of which, 
like the instincts of the animals, come to their due 
and seasonal expression unurged and untrained. 
For the discovery of such instinctive desires — ours 
and all creation's — we need no schooling; although 
for the control and direction of their proper expres- 
sion nothing is more important than the power of 
judgment and will which schooling should give. 
And it can give this control primarily through its 
education, through its bringing out in true Socratic 
wise, of those other and rarer loves, of truth and vir- 
tue and beauty, with which man is so strangely and 
fortunately endowed. Self-control — to fall back to 
the old phrase — is not only the highest quality of the 
liberal man, but it is his essential quality and the very 

117 



118 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

one which makes him deserve the name of freeman; 
and it is self-control which is created by the right 
schooling of the educable desires. 

Now I have spoken in those previous letters 
which dealt with the curriculum of the means for 
bringing the love of truth into the conscious life. 
All that part of education which has to do with the 
imparting of the tools of knowledge and with the 
acquisition of knowledge itself, if it be in the hands 
of a wise and truth-loving teacher, will be answered, 
in the pupil's soul, by a spontaneous and inevitable 
treasuring of all that is honest and genuine and 
true; nature has seen to this, human nature, in giv- 
ing man, out of whatever Eden constituted his first 
innocency, an insatiable taste for the fruit of the 
tree of knowledge. 

Further, and in many ways, the love of virtue 
comes with the school's direction of life. This is, 
indeed, the one meaning which can be attached to 
the word "discipline" that is a proper value. 
Heaven fore fend that any should mistake my mean- 
ing here ! For by discipline I do not at all mean 
the regimentation of youthful lives, with all the 
varied paraphernalia of red-tape regulation and un- 
intelligent suppression and punishment; that is 
merely fantastic and monstrous, and it imprisons 
rather than frees human souls. But by discipline I 
mean the imparting of that conception of duty and 
desire of action which will lead a mortal to put 
himself through the test of effort, that he himself 



POETRY AND PAGEANTRY 119 

may conquer the obstacles which he has been taught 
to see for himself, and attain ends equally self-fore- 
seen and self-commanded. Discipline means putting 
child or man on his mettle, in situations where 
mettle is needed — and it is for this reason that school 
represents and should rightfully represent hard 
work. That schoolroom which is all ease and de- 
light to its occupants, which never wears nor 
wearies, is surely failing of a portion of its mission 
— the training of the ability to stand up under pun- 
ishment which no man can safely dispense with. 

But it is not of devotion to truth nor fidelity to 
virtue that I purpose to write this letter. I have 
mentioned these rather to indicate that their culti- 
vation in the school has methods of its own, which 
are not, as it happens, the methods which educate 
the third great love of the human spirit, the love of 
beauty. There is a certain measure of the stem 
arid the repressive where truth and virtue are the 
stake, without which the stake is lost. Truth is a 
kind of alignment amidst the deviousness of error, 
which it is always a toil to follow — even if the toil 
be an exalted one. Virtue is built upon inhibition, 
upon the suppression of the waywardness and lassi- 
tudes everlastingly besetting mind and body, and 
the way of virtue, too, is a way of effort. One has 
to be tremendously alive to keep one's moral balance 
and tremendously alert to keep one's rational bal- 
ance, — and it is perhaps this that leads us to speak 
of the "uprightness" of virtuous living and of the 



120 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

''steadiness" of sound thinking. But by a kindly 
compensation, the third and perhaps final love of 
them all, the love of beauty, is simple and easy and 
spontaneous; and needs, on the part of the teacher, 
only the soft magic of suggestion in order that it 
may come smilingly into flower. 

''Poetry springs from two instincts lying deep in 
our nature, the instinct for rhythm and the instinct 
for imitation." If Aristotle had pointed to no truth 
save this, he would still deserve his place as greatest 
of all the critics of art. The instinct for rhythm is 
the expressive instinct and at the same time the 
form-giving instinct ; it reflects in its forms the very 
subtlest truth of physiology, the laws of life itself, 
as they are manifested in pulse and breathing and 
indeed in that whole wonderful organic economy 
which makes of a living creature not a substance 
nor a chemical compound, but a form of motion 
and an equilibration of forces. Why, for example, 
should the young not dance when the whole of their 
supple bodies, like the foliage of a tree swaying in a 
summer breeze, is a complex of varied and rhythmic 
motion? And why should not their voices echo in 
pulsating song when they themselves, body and 
mind, are like Aeolian instruments played upon by 
the free airs of heaven? Singing and dancing and 
flashing eyes are the very image of the fullness of 
life and of that high animation which out of a hand- 
ful of sunkist dust and a few brief years creates the 
form of man. Wherefore, let no teacher who hon- 



POETRY AND PAGEANTRY 121 

ors what is fairest in humankind and no school 
which would truly free human nature fail to give 
opportunity, and indeed the cry of speed to all who 
in motion and song will at once praise and realize 
life's beauty. 

As the instinct for rhythm is the expressive in- 
stinct, so the instinct for imitation or mimicry is the 
receptive and appreciative one. All the world is 
full of colors and forms and sounds and motions in 
themselves tantalizing to the shaping fancy and 
challenging to the imagination. The smallest nub 
of humanity in the crib hardly makes the discovery 
of his fingers before he begins to grasp and arrange 
to his own sweet will whatever is graspable and ar- 
rangeable within reach; and each child creeping to 
the window seat is a new aspirant after the moon. 
It is the most natural of continuations that the 
youth, with each new craft made familiarly his 
own — the craft of song, of colors, of words, — 
should weave fanciful snares for all the intangibles 
by which his faculties are surrounded ; and it is out 
of this that are born the passions for painting and 
poetry and acting out dramatically the passions of 
others which make of your youngster an inevitable 
even if unskilled artist. The world is for him 
a veritable palace of suggestion, with a spell for the 
opening of each magic portal, half the mystery of 
which consists in its independent finding. One 
might indeed say that the passion for expression 
and for rhythmic form finds its full complement in 



122 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

the gorgeously varied suggest! veness of all that the 
eye sees and the mind construes; the union of the 
two, sense and motion, rhythm and imitation, is 
the thing we call art. 

Partly what I wish to indicate is that art is not a 
thing apart from life, but that it is a part of life, 
and most of all a part of the young and growing 
life of the school child. There used to be the no- 
tion that music and painting and polite letters were 
all in the nature of ''accomplishments," suitable for 
young ladies with matrimonial aspirations and for 
young gentlemen of drawing-room habits. Now 
neither the aspiration nor the habits are incompat- 
ible wnth a cultivated sense of beauty, and undoubt- 
edly there is this truth in the old view, that the culti- 
vated appreciation enhances social qualities. But 
what is important for teachers to understand, and 
for the world with them, is the fact that the love of 
beauty and its expression in art is something that is 
deep and instinctive and humanly indispensable in 
man's nature; and again that (this being true) it is 
part of the school's task to summon forth the love 
and to indicate the means of expression. 

And what are these means, as the schools and 
teachers possess them? I should answer, poetry 
and pageantry. And in this answer I should mean 
by poetry, not merely formal verse, but, in the 
Greek sense, the whole art of aesthetic creation ; the 
poet is literally a ''maker," and poetry, therefore, 
should represent the inventive or expressive side of 



POETRY AND PAGEANTRY 123 

the love of beauty, leading to manifestation in all 
forms of music and acting and imaginative recount- 
ing, and the whole round of artistic forms. By 
pageantry, again, I should mean what the word first 
stands for, and that is the aesthetic structure, the 
scene, which is given by nature and by the world and 
by all the great abode of the human mind, historical 
and cosmical. The universe is the vastest and most 
magnificent of all pageants, wherein, as Longinus 
says, we are entered, to be not only spectators of 
her contests, but ourselves most ardent competitors 
and ourselves candidates for the prize — those 
crowns of laurel which are the poet's one reward. 
I am but repeating in more ranging terms the com- 
plementation of rhythm and imitation, which now 
should be seen to be not only instincts deep in our 
nature, but veritable laws of life and of the whole 
universe within which we dwell. 

Quite literally, too, poetry and pageantry are the 
natural modes of the school's expression of its un- 
derstanding of beauty. Poetry in its literary forms 
comes naturally as a theme for study, and again it 
should come in the library, through a liberal supply 
of the great poetic books. It comes likewise in song 
and in the forms of music, for never has poetry 
been merely a literary form, but always also a musi- 
cal form. Music and singing, as everyone knows, 
belong by right to school years and to all years. 
Pageantry, also, comes in a variety of forms. For 
I suppose that it is clear that the use of a pencil and 



124 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

paint, form and color, is an art of pageantry 
— the great art of reproducing and preserving 
the scenic loveHness and the picturesque fan- 
tasies which enrich our understanding of nature 
and history and indeed of the panoramic environ- 
ment of everyday hfe. Further it is pageantry 
which plays perhaps the first part in the dramatic 
and festival features of the school; for it is the 
spectacle that is the key to our love of stage and 
masque, and gives to splendid mummeries an 
undying fascination. Youth is ever on the alert for 
these things, ready, with every zest, to bring them 
to realization whenever the chance is given. All 
that is needed is the suggestion, — a magic wand 
which should be in every teacher's hand. 

I do not think I need undertake practical hints; 
the whole matter of art and pageantry is nowadays 
a recognized feature of school organization. But 
I should like to indicate what seems to me a peril 
of the practice, — and this, again, is the peril of reg- 
imentation. I believe in instruction in the technique 
of the arts — this of course; and I know that expert- 
ness in them comes only from work. Nevertheless, 
I am not convinced that training in art ought to 
stand in the curriculum on the same footing as other 
branches. It ought to stand as a special opportu- 
nity, rather than as a requirement, to be pursued 
spontaneously and out of love of it. For this rea- 
son I should make it extra-curricular, and give op- 
portunity for its cultivation in irregular hours, and 



POETRY AND PAGEANTRY 125 

whenever the interest is keen. I beHeve that pro- 
ficiency in the expression of beauty, Hke the under- 
standing and desire of beauty, comes less by routine 
than by intense devotion; and that the moments of 
intensity must be seized upon. Of course I also be- 
lieve in offering every encouragement which re- 
sources permit for the development of taste and the 
manifestation of artistic powers. It is mainly for 
this reason that — as I said once before — had I the 
making of the calendar, it would be full of red-let- 
ter days, days of festival in which the children and 
youths should be the fete-makers, the artists. For 
this same reason (as also for its value in giving an 
understanding love of home and country), I should 
encourage the pageant based upon national history 
or local life, in which the nobility of American char- 
acter or the beauties of our native traditions 
should be brought home to young and old alike. 
For, after all, it is not merely the young that par- 
take of the richness of life in giving expression to 
whatever is lovely, it is also their elders, in whom 
the imagination is a bit staled by care and disap- 
pointment, who are to be won back into the first and 
freshest of inspirations, the love of beauty, which is 
also surely the last and divinest of inspirations. 



LETTER XIII 
THE AGE OF ROMANCE 

THE grace, imagination, and generosities of 
childhood and youth form such a treasure, in 
the whole economy of human life, as deserves not 
only the sympathy of those who have passed the 
golden age, but their most ardent appreciation — 
for it is from the sun of youth, shedding its chang- 
ing but endless glories upon the days of mankind, 
that the workaday and sunset years derive their own 
most precious illumination. I am here returning 
to a former theme — the enrichment of life which 
the presence of youth gives to all — for I am con- 
vinced that it is from this point of view alone that 
the schools, as the especial provision which society 
makes for its youth, will be accorded their true dig- 
nity as institutions of the state. And of all the 
problems which beset the teacher, none, I conceive, 
is more difficult, nor should be the cause of more 
self -searching criticism, than is that which has to do 
with the teacher's attitude toward those enthusiasms 
for things of the imagination which the practical 
years of maturity look back upon as dreaming, but 
which, in the order of nature, are God-given to 
youth. 

127 



128 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

There is, in all human handiwork, whether it be 
wrought in the fragile form of the arts or in the 
brick and iron and brown earth of the industries, a 
character of phantasmagoria. To the worker, of 
the middle years of life, the product of his toil looks 
hard, matter-of-fact and seems building for the ages. 
But to the old man, whose hands rest after his years 
of labor, and to the young, whose mind is vivid with 
the lines and colors of what is yet to be builded, the 
material world is all of the stuff of dreams, and man's 
most stable cities are but as lodges erected for their 
passing season, as camps set up for the night. And 
it is more for this than for any other reason that 
these two, the young and the old, are drawn to a 
common understanding. They live in a visionary 
universe, wherein man's part is to adventure, to dis- 
cover, to snare the evanescent charms, and as best he 
may to make a brave show of his captures against 
that swift-come day when all shall be wiped clean, 
and the earth renewed for a new race ; for it is not 
what man leaves, but what he lives that makes Hfe's 
wealth. 

The young and the old see this, one by a morn- 
ing, the other by an evening sun ; but we of the mid- 
dle years are ready at forgetting it, absorbed as we 
are in what we a bit pompously call the "world's 
work." Yet teachers, at least, cannot afford such 
a forgetting. Theirs it is to be the guides and gate- 
keepers betwixt youth and maturity — theirs, there- 
fore, to understand the ambitions and impulses of 



THE AGE OF ROMANCE 129 

both periods of life. They must forewarn the 
young without disillusioning them, for there are few 
spiritual disasters so fell in consequence as is the 
thing we name disillusionment, — and naming, mis- 
name, since (as old age knows) the most fatal of 
illusions is to be bereft of hopeful imaginings. 
They must also recall to the mature the meaning of 
fancy in life's economy, keeping alive the creative 
flame which is all too easily snuffed by the routine 
of toil. In brief, the teacher must comprehend the 
age of romance not only for the sake of those young 
folk in his charge who are living out its hey-dey, 
but also for the sake of all folk — lest it be forgotten 
by men that all that is kingly in human achievement 
gets its crowning glories from romantic fires, and 
that of all man-built habitations the most wonderful 
are castles in Spain. 

It is for the sake of their romance that I believe 
in keeping the fairy tales and the Halloween cus- 
toms and the Santa Claus myth bright with their 
native fantasy. Take Holloween for example. 
How many realize out of what antiquity this festi- 
val comes to us? For it is assuredly older than 
recorded history or than the art of writing — prob- 
ably by many millenia. Whenever, in October, I 
pass down the street and see in the shop windows 
their decorations — witches and black cats, jack-o'- 
lanterns and sheaves of corn — I go back in thought 
to the great autumn harvest and all souls' festivals 
which our ancestors celebrated in the old world, cen- 



130 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

turies before Caesar, centuries before King Cheops 
and his pyramid. Already in the village communi- 
ties of that olden time there was the great feast of 
the "harvest homing," when sheaves of corn were 
brought in, the last sheaf tied like a doll, to be the 
"spirit of the corn" during the winter months. 
The youths and maidens danced and sang, while as 
Homer describes it, "a lad with delicate voice 
thrummed the clear-toned viol and led the choric 
chant in praise of Linos." Afterwards, there were 
bon-iires (at least in the Celtic north), and the bob- 
bing of apples, and the telling of fortunes, and 
maids gazed into mirroring waters to see the images 
of them they are to marry. At night food was set 
out, for the souls of the dead returned then to share 
in the feast, and thus it was the feast of "all souls," 
of the living and of the dead. Doubtless this is the 
oldest of our festivals, and the games and divining* 
that go with it the oldest that we still follow, out of 
the immemorial past ; and when the children are out, 
as Halloween mummers, and the boys and girls 
with their games and parties, for myself I am grate- 
ful that they keep, unconsciously, this bit of ro- 
mance vital and fresh ; it is to me a symbol of man's 
true heritage, that life of the spirit which outlives 
all his material monuments. 

Christmas which falls just after the change of 
the year at the winter solstice, and Easter which is 
near the spring equinox and in the season of return- 
ing life, are two great religious festivals which, by 



THE AGE OF ROMANCE 131 

some subtlety of providence, fall also at the time of 
very ancient solar feasts : for both were holy to our 
pagan ancestors before the Christian era. Perhaps 
it is alike providential that our national birthday, 
the Fourth of July, should fall so hard upon the 
sum.mer solstice, celebrated with bale-fires and 
Druidic rites many centuries ago. At all events our 
four chief festivals, Easter, the Fourth, Halloween, 
and Christmas, have a double significance; being 
not only what directly we observe them for, but also 
memorials of the antiquity of our race, which, al- 
ready in the dawn of time, was celebrating with the 
seasons the vernal birth of life, its summer matu- 
rity, its autumn homing, and its winter quiescence. 
Surely, there are few things that are essential to 
human nature and existence that are not betokened 
by these old fetes, all still dear to the hearts of 
children. 

Doubtless it is an easy task for the schools to keep 
such celebrations healthy and living, to broaden and 
heighten the manner of their observance, and to in- 
terpret them afresh to each generation of young- 
sters. This festal life of the year is the beginning 
of the romantic interpretation of all life, in the keep- 
ing up of venerable and picturesque traditions as 
well as in the deeper meanings which attach to re- 
ligious and patriotic sentiments. It may also form 
the beginning of a lively interest in astronomy, 
through association with the solar changes which 
mark our seasons and show how intimately human 



132 , LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

fate and welfare is dependent upon the circling 
heavens — whose courses, Plato tells us, are the 
bright and true image of the courses of intelligence 
in our own souls. 

A more difficult task — pertaining still to the age 
of romance — is that which has to do with other and 
even more fundamental human dispositions. For 
the young venerate the past less than they live in 
the present and look to the future: they are the 
great plotters of mankind, and their minds are full 
of forethought. It is this that makes of them he- 
roes and adventurers and knights errant, eager to 
explore all lands and confident in the undertaking 
of all deeds. The proper direction of this spirit of 
adventure, which is the very heart of romance, is 
as important as any part of the task which falls to 
the teacher; and it should be, in method, as remote 
as any from school-room regimentation. For it is 
here that the quality of chivalry, which is the great 
virtue of the romantic age, must be awakened and 
cultivated, and this can never be by command but 
only by volunteering. The courage and loyalty and 
generous helpfulness which are the prime traits of 
chivalry come naturally to youth, once they are 
ideally shown; but in order that they may be made 
living they must have opportunity for exercise — for 
with all his imagination, your boy in the 'teens is a 
hardy realist, demanding space within which to 
move and effortful deeds to be done in the w^orld 
about him. Hence, there must be action in his life, 



THE AGE OF ROMANCE 133 

to make it real, and chivalric action to make real his 
chivalric ideals. And of all our recent educational 
innovations none seems to me so promising as the 
institution of the boy scouts and the camp-fire girls. 
For here is supplied in just the right mode that com- 
bination of free opportunity and unconstraining in- 
struction which will bring to its natural flower the 
knightliness which is in the soul of every youth, 
awaiting only its self-discovery. Assuredly no 
school system is complete without, not only the lib- 
eral opportunity for these movements, but also the 
positive provision for them and encouragement of 
them. Soon (and it cannot be too soon) there will 
be no American community in which scout and 
camp-fire will not seem as essential as the schools 
themselves ; nor any school whose spirit and method 
will not be greatly and profitably modified by their 
presence. Their introduction will be in a commu- 
nity which has known them not, like the throwing 
wide of the windows to sunlight and free air. 

The spirit of chivalry, on its adventurous side, 
wherein it calls for courage and self-sacrifice, is un- 
derstood already in childhood, and may guide action 
already in childhood. Nor can there be any other 
preparation of more value for that other phase of 
chivalric romance which becomes the ardent im- 
pulse of elder youth. It is often and truly said that 
*'romantic love" — meaning thereby that love whose 
heart is all loyalty and devotion — came into the 
world with mediaeval chivalry, that it was unknown 



134 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

to the pagans both of the ancient Mediterranean and 
the ancient Baltic, and existed only when Christian- 
ity had raised woman to a position of dignity and 
all men to a sense of spiritual companionship. Nor 
can youth which has been reared in the chivalric tra- 
dition, itself a thing too precious to lose, ever fail 
of a nobler and truer sense of the duties of lovers 
as well as of the lastingness of true love's troth, 
when this shall become the great adventure of life. 
The institution of marriage, as all men know, is at 
the foundation of the state; and in the control and 
interpretation of this institution, too, the schools, 
whether willingly or not, must play their leading 
role. It is in the school room that 3'Outh and maid 
first meet on a social plane, and in the school that 
perhaps most of the marriage unions get their first 
impulse. To this there can surely be no feeling of 
objection; for to a student of the institutions of 
mankind, among the various races of men, no fact 
can be more obvious than that of all modes of 
match-making humanly devised (and they are 
many), none is comparable with the free association 
of the young of the two sexes, intimate without be- 
ing either prudish or familiar, in the public schools 
of democratic states. 

Of course, with such a responsibility theirs, the 
schools are more than ever bound to the cultivation 
— early and late and assiduous — of all ideals that 
ennoble human relations, most of all, therefore, to 
the cultivation of those ideals of chivalry which are 



THE AGE OF ROAIANCE 135 

the grace and illumination of romantic love. It 
must be, then, the teacher's solicitude that each boy 
shall be in his own conscience ''chevalier without 
fear and without stain," and that each maid shall 
read in her mirror the love of an inner as well as 
the quest of an outer beauty. The age of aristoc- 
racy is gone by; ours is an age of democracy: but 
the spirit of chivalry is a thing too precious for 
mankind to lose, and the schools must be its pre- 
servers. 



LETTER XIV 
THE SCHOOL SYSTEM 

IN the letters which hitherto I have written I have 
been concerned with the work which the schools 
have to do, the education which it should be theirs 
to impart, and the great task which is set for them 
in the realization of public welfare. The schools 
exist for the sake of the common weal of the com- 
monwealth, for the bettering of men's lives, and 
should be constantly adapted and adapting them- 
selves to this great purpose. Of this, as funda- 
mental, we who are teachers must never allow our- 
selves to lose sight : otherwise we fail in our pro- 
fession. 

And there is an especial and insidious danger of 
becoming blinded to the great end of education to 
which teachers more than others are liable. This is 
the institutionalized aspect of the public school, most 
in danger of misleading its own officials, who are the 
teachers. Like every other great public institution, 
the public schools tend tow^ard bureaucratic organi- 
zation, and hence towards a system which constantly 
threatens (for this is the nature of bureaucracy) to 
forget or lose its purpose in the effort to preserve 
its outward forms. Schools — grade, grammar, 

137 



138 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

high, college, — interlocking and superposed like a 
vast and complex edifice, inevitably stress and strain 
their many members into rigid and mechanical 
structures ; only the most alert intelligence can keep 
this edifice from defeating its inner design, which 
is, and must ever be, the cultivation of mind and 
character. Hence it is that teachers, and all other 
school officials, must be always on their guard 
against the evils of ungiving systematization in the 
institution itself — the outer and evil counterpart of 
that bureaucracy of mind which we call pedantry. 
Let us, above all, be not pedants of the "school 
system !" 

I say this by way of caution, for there is no dis- 
position to evil to which teachers are so pecuHarly 
liable as in the disposition to become slaves to their 
**system." Routine is always easier than invention, 
and in schools, where some routine is imperative, 
the unslacking temptation is for the teacher to jog 
on in a deep-rutted habit. Of course (to save our 
dignities) we like to call the habit-making process 
"administrative work" — but this is self -camouflage; 
most of what goes as school administration, from 
the university down, is nothing more than clerk's 
slavery; it all goes in the direction of regulation, 
and that means straight toward the tomb of what 
is vital and promising in the great task of bringing 
forth conscious life. There is an anecdote (which 
I trust is not true) of a certain superintendent of 
schools to the effect that he boasted that if given 



THE SCHOOL SYSTEM 139 

the grade to which a child in his schools belonged 
he could tell at any hour of the school day 
what pages of what book were open before it. This 
seems to me horrible and monstrous. It is the 
goose-step of the mental drill, and in its consequence 
can only be even more ruinous than is its military 
model. I cannot believe this tale to be true, but its 
mere currency in the community shows the exist- 
ence of the ideal. Men flatter themselves by call- 
ing it educational ''efficiency," whereas it is in truth 
neither educational nor efficient, but only the dismal 
clanking of fetters. Teachers know (how many 
of them have not cried out against it) that they are 
ever repeatedly being hobbled in coils of red tape — 
official in many cases, but also often self-imposed, 
— magnified under the name of system ; but teachers 
know also that a slothful yielding to this is, for 
weak mortals, vastly easier than the preservation 
of that true energy of instruction which comes only 
from the life of ideas. In the last resort as in the 
first, the work of teaching is a work of the mind 
bent upon discovery. 

System in public schools is necessary (this goes 
without saying), but there is nothing sacrosanct 
about its forms (and this needs saying). For ex- 
ample, there is a reflection of nature in the hier- 
archy of our school "grades," — primary, intermedi- 
ate, grammar, high, college, graduate — formidable 
enough when set out in order ! And the nature which 
is reflected is the nature of the growing minds and 



140 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

bodies of children; that is the fact which gives its 
whole meaning to such a system. The grades are, 
so to speak, coefficients or functions of these minds 
and bodies, varied by rather than varying the nat- 
ural development of intelligence and desire. If I 
may change my figure, the school system should be 
conceived, not as a mold into which plastic human 
material is to be poured and rigidly cast, but as like 
the many-chambered shell of the nautilus, of which 
each apartment is the creation of the growing life 
of the voyager, captain of the craft. 

Probably the very worst feature of our systema- 
tizing tendency is the reduction of educational 
"standards" to a kind of deadly arithmetic. What 
I refer to is the use of percentage gradings as tests 
of advancement, the equation of subjects in the 
form of number-hour courses and credits, and the 
giving of diplomas and certificates on the basis of 
purely numerical records. Certainly I understand 
that something of this is necessary ; but, at all events 
in the higher grades, the method has reached the 
level of the grotesque. University students go 
about seeking "credit hours," when they should be 
interested in learning; they forget that what is of 
value to them must be an education, and they rush 
pell-mell after the degree. Too rapidly this same 
method (with its ruin of ideals) is pressing down- 
ward; already it has seized upon the high school, 
and, if my information is not at fault, is even now 
invading the grades. Clearly arlthmetization is a 



THE SCHOOL SYSTEM 141 

menace, and the sooner teachers set themselves 
against its encroachments the safer will be the fu- 
ture of real learning and the truer the fundamental 
patriotism of the schools. Americans rightly pro- 
claim as a national characteristic the spirit of in- 
dividual independence and individual initiative — 
the power of a man to look out for himself ; but as- 
suredly there is no better method for destroying this 
spirit and its powers than an educational system de- 
prived of inner life and reduced to an outer num- 
bering. When the final meaning of going to school 
is a mathematical computation, plus a badge, who 
will prize its gifts or what state will profit by them? 
Along with the evil of exaggerated numberings 
goes servility to texts and methods. Both of these 
evils — the text-book and the method — grow with 
the size and solidity of the school organization. 
Again I would say that I do not wish to refuse 
merit or necessity to that from which the evil use is 
prone to come; I should not reject text-books nor 
do away with methods of teaching. These things 
are not themselves bad. What is bad about them is 
their misuse, and that comes by way of imperatives 
and regulations. Take the text-book. In some 
states there is by law state-wide use of the same 
book or series of books in all the schools of the state 
— an intolerable opportunity for graft, as well as a 
denial of all rights of independent judgment on the 
part of the teacher. It stands to reason — and it is 
the fact, — that the utility of a text-book varies with 



142 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

the person who uses it, and that for persons of dif- 
fering powers differing books are often to be pre- 
ferred. The real guard against misuse of such 
means is the teacher who can teach without any 
text-book, and who never regards the book in any 
other hght than as a secondary help in the task of 
teaching. Indeed, of what consequence is the 
teacher if he have not the gift of imparting knowl- 
edge from his own possession of it? Which must 
also be by his own best self-discovered methods. I 
remember, twenty years ago, how students in 
teachers' colleges used to be canting the phrase 
''apperception mass" (brought with not a few other 
pedagogic evils out of Germany), thinking that it 
was a kind of open sesame to a mode of teaching 
without labor and of learning without conscious- 
ness. Today, "socialization," *'motivization," and 
I know not what other polysyllables, are twisted pff 
the pedagogic tongue with the same old facility. 
As a matter of fact, most of this is just showy jar- 
gon. All such methods resolve in plain English to 
the one and only true method of teaching, and that 
is to find an interested teacher able to interest a 
pupil : interest means willing work, work means un- 
derstanding, and understanding means the advance- 
ment of that learning which is precious in life. An 
honest school official, discovering an honest teacher, 
will drop pedantic apparatus and, with easy con- 
science, bid him go to his task — the true way of 
which it is for the teacher to find. 



THE SCHOOL SYSTEM 143 

But I have still a third bone to pick with the sys- 
tem-makers, and this is their substitution of the 
''accrediting" for the ''examination" method of ad- 
vancing students. This grew not unnaturally out 
of the point-credit system; for where the subjects 
studied vary in many directions, it is obviously dif- 
ficult to agree upon the matter of examinations, 
while it is relatively easy to make clerical computa- 
tions of number-records. But because it was easy 
of growth is no reason why the method is beneficial 
in operation; and in my opinion it is distinctly the 
reverse. 

It is not that I wish to hold an unqualified brief 
for the examination. For a teacher whose pupils 
are constantly under eye, with day to day contact, 
they need not be necessary. Of course, where the 
classes are very large, examinations cannot be dis- 
pensed with, and probably even for the small class 
there is a certain invigorating bracing-up as a result 
of the test. But it is not of examinations within 
the class room that I am thinking; these are a fea- 
ture of method, and should be the teacher's own af- 
fair. Very different is the case with "entrance ex- 
aminations." In passing from one school or from 
one teacher to another, the surest mode of getting 
acquainted is the examination which shows both 
parties — teacher and pupil — what is to be expected 
of one another. No one with long experience 
in teaching can doubt that time and effort are both 
constantly thrown to the winds as a result of the 



144 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

wrong placing of students, growing out of the ac- 
crediting method. This is naturally most an evil 
in the university, and in particular in the relation 
of the university to the ''accredited" high schools. 
Instead of bringing these schools into touch with 
the university the accrediting system puts them out 
of touch with what is real and vigorous in college 
ideals — and that is the body of learning which the 
college aims to impart and which the entrance ex- 
amination served (even if feebly) to define. 

I do not mean to say that examinations (in many 
ways crude devices) are panaceas for the ills which 
beset system. But they do have this merit: that 
they focus attention upon matter and not upon man- 
ner, upon inner attainment and not upon outer 
credits — they stand for the same kind of difference 
as that between character and reputation. And in 
doing this they point the way to the kind of medi- 
cine or sanitation which should immunize the school 
system from its own dangers and lead to the pres- 
ervation of educational health. This is the con- 
stant interchange of ideas and points of view as be- 
tween teachers, among themselves, and between 
teachers and pupils through variety of relation. It 
is again the old problem of securing human con- 
tact, individual with individual, mind with mind, 
as the real foundation of the birth and life of the 
humane spirit. As to how this can be brought 
about, I can at least make a suggestion. 

My suggestion is of this nature. Among col- 



THE SCHOOL SYSTEM 145 

leges there is rapidly growing in favor what is 
called the exchange professorship. This means 
that for a term or a year a teacher changes places 
with a colleague in some other institution. Each 
of the exchanging professors meets new profes- 
sional associates and a new style of student, while 
the students are given the benefit of a fresh point 
of view in the familiar subject. Such exchanges 
are made not merely as between the institutions of 
our several states, but, between teachers from for- 
eign countries — Frenchmen, Spaniards, Japanese, 
lecturing in the United States and American pro- 
fessors lecturing in the schools of these countries. 
Such a system has its counterpart in the rotation of 
teachers in the grades, in teaching by substitute 
teachers, and from another angle in the lesser per- 
manency with which secondary school teachers are 
employed, all good in so far as these produce va- 
riety of personal contact. Professional imperma- 
nency is not in itself good, of course; but is there 
any reason why the university method of ex- 
change teaching should not be carried down into the 
schools below, once the teacher comes to his own in 
his career? 

Possibly a simpler step toward the same sound 
end would be the adoption of the English plan of 
"visiting examiners," according to which examina- 
tions that mark important transitions in the school 
course (what we call graduations) are given by 
teachers brought from neighboring schools for the 



146 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

purpose. Inevitably a teacher who knows that 
those whom he is training are to be tried out by a 
colleague having different methods of teaching feels 
a certain healthy toning up of his own work; he is 
kept upon his mettle, and thinks of his teaching not 
in terms of the judgment rendered by students 
knowing nothing of his subject except what he 
gives, but in terms of the mature judgment of a 
fellow teacher. Certainly such a plan would be of 
vast benefit to our universities, and if carried down 
into high school grades it would eventually out- 
value every device of official inspection. 

The reason is simple. Teaching is a personal 
art, not a matter of apparatus, method, system, ma- 
chinery. It thrives where the teachers have liv- 
ing responsibilities and are aware of their respon- 
sibilities, alike to their pupils and to the great in- 
heritance of human civilization, which it is theirs 
to guard through its untarnished transmission to 
posterity. 



LETTER XV 

THE TEACHER'S PROFESSION 

• 

TEACHING is one of the oldest of the profes- 
sions. It has a record of eminence in the 
names of those who have followed it — philos- 
ophers, scholars, scientists, men of affairs — second 
to no other calling. It has a present and future 
importance for society, in the preservation and devel- 
opment of the state, second to none. It demands 
in aptitude and in the generous quality of human 
wisdom a high endowment, and in preparation (at 
the standard) an arduous and exacting training. 
With such a history and position, the profession of 
teaching should be one of the most honorable of 
professional employments. It is, judged by com- 
mon repute, one of the least honorable. As all men 
know, the teacher (college professor or district 
schoolmistress) is everywhere regarded as a legiti- 
mate subject of a kind of public patronizing — as if 
teachers were necessarily marked by a certain child- 
ishness of mind, because of their preoccupation 
with the young. Such a point of view must have 
its causes, which are certainly of importance for 
those who are in the profession to understand — 
not merely with a view to bettering their own repu- 

147 



148 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

tation, but with a view to overcoming whatever de- 
fects in the character of their profession may jus- 
tify the reputation. 

For, frankly, teachers everywhere know that 
there is some justification for the pubHc attitude — 
understanding by "justification" an honest and in- 
telHgent human motive. This begins and ends in 
the fact that the attitude is in so considerable a 
measure shared by teachers themselves. The pub- 
lic but takes them at their own self-appraisement. 
There is no human trait quite so impossible to con- 
ceal as is one's estimate of oneself; your conceited 
man proclaims his quality as upon a placard, and 
the broken in spirit is never to be mistaken. It is, 
too, the most natural thing in the world (ask for a 
job and you will discover it) to judge another at 
his own valuation, which means that it is at least 
well to have such good conceit as knowledge of 
one's powers warrants. And this is just what the 
teaching profession lacks; it is humble and spirit- 
less in its own self-esteem, and is taken in a like 
mode by the public. The first great reform needed 
among teachers is conviction of the importance and 
pride in the accomplishment of their work. 

Of course there are objective reasons for this 
subjective defect. Everybody is familiar with 
them; educational discussions always return to 
them. I refer to the forms of preparation for and 
the manner of recruiting the profession; to the 
questions of salary, pension, tenure ; to the problem 



THE TEACHER'S PROFESSION 149 

of *' feminization," which is serious primarily be- 
cause it tends to make teaching a temporary chore 
rather than a Hfe work; to the diffuse organization 
and lack of professional spirit of teachers, as com- 
pared with men in other employments. Each of 
these factors is in the nature of a real social prob- 
lem, and each tends to weaken the power and de- 
teriorate the work of teaching, while all of them 
together are contributory to the one great funda- 
mental defect — the weak professional self-respect 
of teachers. Once this is reformed, the public 
standing of school employes will right itself. 

But undoubtedly the reform of spirit must follow 
upon some program for the solution of the besetting 
problems. I do not think it necessary that the so- 
lutions be fully reached in order that the profession 
be born into a new and healthier consciousness; 
there need be but their clear formulation (perhaps 
in the shape of a platform, such as politicians em- 
ploy) ; this, of itself, would tend to create spirit. 
And it is of the possibility of such a teachers' plat- 
form, conceived in the broadest way, that I would 
speak. 

Its prime article should surely be a clear expres- 
sion of the teacher's conception of the meaning of 
education in society. There should be a statement 
of the place of liberal training in the whole educa- 
tional life of the state; of the place and justification 
of vocational training, and especially of its relation- 
ship to the great labor problems that are shaking 



150 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

the world; of the relation and meaning of ''second- 
ary" and "higher" education, and of the modes in 
which a democratical government should select can- 
didates for the latter. On these matters I have al- 
ready expressed or implied my own views ; but I be- 
lieve that a formal enouncement, say from Ne- 
braska teachers as a body, and from American 
teachers as a body, and again from the teaching 
profession of all the allied democracies, represented 
in a great congress — that such an enouncement would 
be of the greatest weight in the public mind and of 
the highest significance to teachers themselves. We 
all believe that the world is on the eve of a vital 
reconstruction, affecting the whole ideal of life; 
and we should realize that this reconstruction makes 
not only an unexampled demand upon the teachers 
of men, but that it offers the teaching profession 
such an opportunity for habilitation as it has never 
yet seen. In the generation that is to create the 
new life the teachers should be leaders. 

But first we must clear away the dust of the past. 
And I should follow, in my platform, the enounce- 
ment of principles by specific ''planks" dealing with 
the venerable ills which beset us. Among these (to 
take the problems in the order in which I cited them 
above), there would be first a plank calling for a 
state-wide consideration of the qualifications to be 
demanded of teachers and of the modes of their 
certification already in the statute books, for it is 
surely time that the whole matter be overhauled. 



THE TEACHER'S PROFESSION 151 

There is red tape to be raveled out, and common 
sense to be injected in, and a kind of general 
rule to be held before all eyes to the effect that 
if it be not strictly true that ''teachers are born and 
not made," it is at least true that they must be born 
with proper endowment before they can be made 
with proper finish. 

The questions of salary, tenure, pay, are inti- 
mately related to the others — indeed, are rather de- 
pendent upon other reforms than determinants of 
them. Mere salary or wage increases are of little 
moment unless they be accompanied by such a ton- 
ing-up of professional standards and such a growth 
of professional spirit as will justify them. Finan- 
cial returns are, after all, in a broad way reflective 
of social valuations; teachers must raise the valua- 
tion first. However, for the plank's sake, there 
should be an effort to name a fair scale, in all the 
branches of the teaching service. 

The problem of feminization is really only a spe- 
cial phase of the problem of temporary tenure, 
which is, I suspect, more than any other one thing 
at the root of the discomforts that professionally 
beset teachers. For out of this temporary tenure 
grow a number of evils. There is, first, the fact 
that the teacher is not an organic member of the 
community which he serves. He is a passing citi- 
zen, a missionary at best, a tramp at worst. This 
is the height of absurdity, for there is no profession 
where the demand for a long and intimate service 



152 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

is more real. We look upon the ''family physician" 
as an institution; for the reason that the good doc- 
tor must know not only the symptoms of disease, 
but the habits of health and the bodily constitutions 
of his patients. How much more should this be 
the case with the physician of the mind — slowest of 
all human functions in developing and hardest of 
all to measure and diagnose? Moreover, if the 
teacher be in the community what ideally he should 
be, a leader in its whole intellectual life, he can be- 
come this only through a long familiarity with it 
and with its needs, and that means only through 
becoming a part of it. The ideal schoolmaster is 
the man who knows the youth from infancy up- 
ward, who knows the parents, who knows the na- 
ture and impulses which in each community give in- 
dividuality and color to the local society. Such a 
man or woman must pass a lifetime with a school. 
Another defect of passing tenure is that it tends to 
over-emphasize the superintendence, the system 
side, of school conduct. When teachers become 
differentiated into groups, the one composed en*- 
tirely of the long-tried and the other of the tem- 
porary ''job holders," it becomes impossible to 
avoid bureaucracy ; the first-named group will inev- 
itably control and prescribe for the second, taking 
away the whole spirit of independence and all incen- 
tive to invention — in other words, rooting "Ameri- 
canism" from out the craft. This, it can be imag- 
ined, is but a poor preparation for the preservation 
of our national spirit. 



THE TEACHER'S PROFESSION 153 

Now to deal with these evils, I should favor a 
plank, or series of them, something in this order. 
First, a formal organization of teachers, not in loose 
associations, but in self-discriminating societies, 
having requirements and grades; as, for example, 
there should be at least a grade of master teachers 
and a grade of apprentice teachers, with differing 
professional privileges attaching to each one. The 
idea would be to distinguish those who are making 
a life work of teaching from those who undertake 
it experimentally; for surely it is the former who 
should set the standard of the profession. Second 
— feminism again — there should be a plank encour- 
aging the employment of married women, not as 
against those who are professional, but as against 
those who are obviously but candidates for marriage 
(in itself a legitimate and respectable social condi- 
tion, but not conducive to the advancement of 
teaching). Third, there should be a call for the 
more public recognition of the teacher in the com- 
munity which he serves, both through a legal im- 
provement of his position (school-board fiat is not 
necessarily the best or sole ground for employment ; 
there might be a county superintendent's ratifica- 
tion or veto of local action, with a possible referen- 
dum to the community) ; and again through local 
or state-fund salary guarantees as a reward for long 
service. 

But all such planks and the whole of such a plat- 
form would have to do with external changes which 



154 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

could be of little significance if unaccompanied by 
internal revelation. What it all comes to is this: 
the teacher must find in his work itself such an in- 
terest and such a field for achievement that he will 
be ever upon his mettle to realize its possibilities. 
There must be more independence and less superin- 
tendence ; more invention and less convention ; more 
imagination and less habit. The plank toward a 
division of teachers into masters and apprentices 
would look toward this; for at present the great 
body of teachers in the public schools are all treated 
as apprentices, and few, even of the long-expe- 
rienced, are given master work to do. The plank 
leading toward permanency of tenure should look 
in the same direction. For if a person of imagina- 
tion and trained observation, such as a teacher 
should be, were to be placed in any American com- 
munity with a life work there in view, it would be- 
come not only his duty, but the fascination of a 
lifetime, to come to such an understanding of that 
community as should reveal in it an image of all 
human nature and of all the world. This is no 
passing fantasy. The monuments of English liter- 
ature number many a work of poetry and fiction de- 
voted to the interpretation of village communities, 
and there is not a township in our west but calls for 
its Grav or Austin or Hawthorne. Furthermore, 
if the interest be scientific, there is in every com- 
munity material for social studies that should be 
not onlv of local, but of state and national value 



THE TEACHER'S PROFESSION 155 

We all know what missionaries have done in the 
way of "opening up" remote quarters of earth to 
the knowledge of mankind. The process of ''open- 
ing up" is never completed while men continue to 
be born, and it should be a part of the teacher's ex- 
pectation to be an interpreter of human nature in 
whatever community his task is set. Such an in- 
terest was that of Shakespeare, such that of George 
Eliot. And can any ask from life a more inspiring 

gift? 



LETTER XVI 

THE TEACHER'S LIFE 

I WONDER if any of my readers shared with 
me the feeHng of distaste for the term "teach- 
ing profession" with which I headed my last letter. 
I cannot quite explain the feeling — a combination 
of vague apology and vague resentment, both di- 
rected to no particular source, and yet firmly at- 
taching to just this union of words; as if there were 
no truly professional character to teaching or as if 
to acknowledge oneself to be a teacher were some- 
how discreditable. The title of "professor," which 
goes with certain sorts of teaching, seems to share 
this same nameless opprobium — mild, but omni- 
present; so that, when introduced by the title, one 
feels, as it were, a spinal invitation to cringe as half 
expecting to be met by a supercilious, "Ah, indeed !" 
Certainly we shall all be rejoiced when the practice 
of the teacher's art is relieved from such question- 
able honorifics, meantime wearing them with such 
grace as may be ours. 

And yet (there is always an "and yet") — and yet 
teaching is a profession, as noble as the noblest. It 
has not, in its outward forms, the recognitions that 
attach to many other professions; it is notoriously 

157 



158 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

a field of disproportion of material returns for prep- 
aration and labor expended; it suffers from uncer- 
tainty of organization and indefiniteness of status. 
But in spite of all these defects it has attractions 
which keep the ranks filled with not incapable men 
and women, willing to devote to it the years of a 
lifetime. It owns, indeed, a certain inner and sub- 
tle fascination which is far easier to perceive than 
to define. And this, it appears to me, it is of the 
greatest importance for teachers themselves to un- 
derstand. Accordingly, I propose to devote this, 
my last letter, to an effort to show wherein I con- 
ceive it to lie. 

What first comes to mind as the true satisfaction 
of the teacher is the oft-spoken privilege of observ- 
ing the growth of that most wonderful and various 
of growing things, the human mind. It is a great 
part of all human gratification to observe and influ- 
ence change, and especially such changes as are in- 
timately connected with human welfare. Thus, 
the farmer takes a solid satisfaction in the growing 
crop, quite apart from its market-price; the trades- 
man in the expansion of his business ; the physician 
in his cures; the engineer in the success of a diffi- 
cult project, pitting his wit against the forces of na- 
ture. Something of the same thing, but assuredly 
in increased measure because of the subtlety of the 
psychical forces with which he deals, comes to the 
teacher in watching and molding the development 
of the minds of the young. My dear colleague and 



THE TEACHER'S LIFE 159 

one-time teacher, Dr. Wolfe (born to the art if ever 
teacher was)' puts it: '*I like to watch their eyes 
change," — well knowing that the changing expres- 
sion of the eyes is the most sensitive of all the ex- 
pressional barometers of the mind. 

Such an interest is, of course, profoundly per- 
sonal at the core. It rests upon mutual confidence 
and friendship, — qualities upon whose significance 
we might devote much reflection ; for the very foun- 
dation of all human welfare is ultimately confidence 
and friendship. The Greeks (whom alb the' world 
agrees in naming wise) devoted many a discourse 
to the praise of friendship, and told many a tale of 
Damon and Pythias. I suppose the most famous 
of all teachers and the greatest of all is Socrates; 
and you will remember that Socrates was friend 
first and teacher only through his friendships. 
You will remember, too (in the Meno there is an 
amusing description), how Socrates always turned 
from the elder and devoted himself to the younger 
men, as if more confident of youth and its promise. 
Which is just to the point. Boys and girls are not, 
as their elders are apt to be, ready concealers of 
their natures and dispositions ; they have not yet put 
on a mask; rather, they are open and unsuspicious, 
and show their souls' depths quite unconsciously. 
Hence, it is that friendship comes easily to youth; 
and the teacher, perpetually dealing with youth, is 
granted the perpetual privilege of finding new 

^Died July 30, 1918. 



160 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

friendships, which for other men and women be- 
come more and more difficult as the years increase. 
What with their faculties, ideas, ambitions, aspira- 
tions ever changing into brighter and more varie- 
gated forms, and, with the intimacy of instruction, 
ever more generously shown, pupils naturally be- 
come comrades, and teachers are their natural 
friends. Thus the most precious of all treasures, 
a sense of mutual faith and of human fellowship, 
is made warm and vivid and in a special sense the 
teacher's privilege. 

This, I say, is what is most often looked upon as 
the great reward of teaching. Frequently it is 
likened to the parent's reward in the rearing of 
children. That it is a genuine and precious addi- 
tion to the teacher's life none can deny who have 
at all experienced it ; nor need any one who has seen 
examples (as assuredly I have) doubt for a moment 
that with many teachers — those born, I should say, 
with a genius for friendship — it is an all-sufficient 
reward for the labor of teaching. But for all that, 
from certain points of view and to many teachers, 
especially of those who have become worn through 
long years of teaching, it is insufficient. For, after 
all, there is something perpetually one-sided in the 
friendship of teacher to pupil. The teacher is the 
unceasing giver, the pupil the unceasing recipient — 
a relation of a transitive rather than of a reciprocal 
type. I do not, of course, mean to say this of in- 
dividuals (for there are abundant exceptions, truest 



THE TEACHER'S LIFE 161 

friendships originated in the class-room) ; but I do 
say it of the teacher as such and of the pupil as 
such. The former occupies a fixed position, the lat- 
ter is a bird of passage; and in a certain true sense 
the teacher is in the situation of mine host of the 
tavern, who gives his whole life to serving transient 
guests. It is here that lies the fundamental differ- 
ence between the parent's and teacher's relation to 
the child. The parent gives freely and devotedly 
through a term of years, but the time comes when 
the antique virtue of filial piety reverses the rela- 
tionship and the child becomes the giver and care- 
taker and the perpetuator of the family name and 
honor. For the teacher there is no similar return; 
the giving is utterly altruistic, and that means (if 
it be not balanced by some other type of compensa- 
tion) in the long run a spiritual impoverishment 
— for it must be well borne in mind, that love, to be 
fruitful, must be mutual. The teacher's affection 
for his charge is to parental love very much what 
platonic love is to true love. It is true, that in cer- 
tain rare ways Plato's Uranian love gives rise to 
very fine and noble human relationships, but it is 
also true that the normal spiritual health of man- 
kind lies not in this direction ; the thing may be ri- 
diculous. Observers have long and often noted 
"the tired, altruistic faces" of school teachers, — 
haloed, as it were, with the beauty of giving. But 
there is also a certain truth in the cruel, even if com- 
monplace, jests directed at the school teacher's face. 



162 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

Men's countenances are the speaking books of their 
characters; and it would be simple defeat of the 
truth to deny that in the expression which long serv- 
ice has ingrained into the features of many a 
teacher, the plain reading is spiritual impoverish- 
ment. Against this it should be the whole desire 
and duty of those who cherish the profession to 
guard: their desire, because the teacher, too, has a 
right to the fulness of life; their duty, because the 
worn teacher is like an abused soil, barren and 
fruitless. 

Fortunately the way of salvation is not far to 
find. It has been pointed by philosopher after 
philosopher in the course of human history, and its 
name is the Idea. I mean the kind of Idea that 
Plato talked about, not a mere present possession 
of the mind, but a pattern of minds and men and 
human natures and states to be. Of all earthly 
things that men create, their own more perfect so- 
cieties, their Utopias, are surely the finest; and 
amongst all Utopias those of teachers are first and 
foremost. This is, and should be, their perpetual 
source of invigo ration and their perpetual and 
greatest service to mankind. It is theirs (as I have 
said in other letters) to preserve out of the past its 
great inheritance of human ideals, the thing we call 
civilization. But it is also to them, and to them 
more than to any other class or profession, that is 
committed the task of framing the future. Teach- 
ers are statesmen by their very art, and it should be 



THE TEACHER'S LIFE 163 

their one deep and abiding interest to become wise 
in statesmanship. , This, assuredly, is a fulness of 
hfe. 

Doubtless I should explain. The matter comes 
from the very fact of that intimate and changing 
contact with youth, the teacher's friendships, of 
which I have already spoken. Youth is the forma- 
tive period; it is the period of the shaping of gen- 
erous and disinterested ideals, the period of true 
public spirit, the period of Castles in Spain which 
are none the less one day to become models of 
earthly estates. It is in this period that the teach- 
er's . influence is all-powerful, and it is because of 
this influence that his is perhaps the greatest of all 
forces in the fashioning of the future — wherefore 
I speak of him, and truly, as a statesman. 

And in one very important particular he is the 
most qualified of statesmen. We all recognize the 
fact that wisdom in statecraft is in large part de- 
pendent upon knowledge of human history: our 
American in politics must know history and under- 
stand the ideals of his country; the international 
politicians must comprehend the generations of men 
gone by and the ideals toward which they strove 
through the slow toils of the centuries. The his- 
torian, by the very nature of his concern, is put in 
a position of detachment with reference to human 
affairs, and he acquires therefrom the ability to 
judge Impartially and to select out of the past wis- 
dom for the future. But necessarily he suffers 



164 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

from one great defect; and that is that he can know 
the past never directly, as man to man, but only re- 
motely and imaginatively, divided by the screen of 
the years from the facts which he scrutinizes; so 
that he can never quite get at their human, living 
reality. It is only God who can know history di- 
rectly and truly. 

Now the teacher, as it happens, has a source of 
knowledge nearer in its nature to a divine detach- 
ment than has any other mortal. For the genera- 
tions of students who come and go under his charge 
are like the generations of men whom the historian 
surveys. Only, and in this he differs from the his- 
torian, the teacher sees these generations of youth- 
ful minds face to face, and thought to thought; 
there is nothing dead or passive in their succession, 
as is the case with the historic successions of the 
past; rather, all is living and shaping and life-creat- 
ing. This it is which gives to the teacher the 
opportunity of forming an unique type of judgment 
of human nature and of its possibilities, and this it 
is which makes his work of such tremendous sig- 
nificance in the ordering of the policies of the fu- 
ture ; this, too, which makes it imperative that your 
teacher who is true to his profession is of necessity 
an Utopian, in that fair sense in which Utopia is a 
forecast of the future of mankind. 

Most of all, this means that the teacher must be 
framing and depicting the man, the citizen, of the 
world that is to be tomorrow. From the acts and 



THE TEACHER'S LIFE 165 

ideas of the eager youth that pass before him in 
the class-room he must come to know human pow- 
ers and to select among them the best and noblest ; 
and he must cultivate those better powers; and he 
must create vivid images of the character which 
they represent, that the youth may consciously be- 
hold them, and beholding may set themselves to 
their realization. This is a truly prophetic task; it 
calls for the insight of the seer and the creative 
power of the man of imagination. It demands pa- 
tience, patience, for the labor is slow; but its re- 
wards are as precious as can be aught human. For 
surely it is no small thing to be an architect of the 
habitations of the future and no small thing to be- 
come a portraitist, in the living flesh, of that Man 
of the Future who is to embody and re-embody all 
those Utopian dreams which are the essence of hu- 
man hope and the solace of all human life. Where- 
fore I say, let us rejoice in the task of the teacher, 
which is none other than pilotage in the great voy- 
age of spiritual discovery. 



II 

FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 



T 



FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 
I 

HE question of foreign-language study is ulti- 
^ mately — as far as the schools are concerned 
— a college-curriculum question. Were it not for 
the fact that the grade schools are feeders of the 
colleges and that the colleges require foreign-lan- 
guage study, there can be no serious doubt that such 
subjects would drop from the common schools; the 
Mockett law could never have been passed in Ne- 
braska had there been no German taught in the 
State University. There is, to be sure, a minor 
non-college problem presented by parochial schools 
in which foreign languages are used or taught for 
the sake of preserving religious solidarities; but 
even conceding that this problem is of some mo- 
ment, its present proportions make it, by compari- 
son, insignificant. It is the policy of the colleges 
with respect to language study that really deter- 
mines, and doubtless will continue to determine, 
the complexion of our education. An illustration 
in point is the recent experience of a university 
instructor. A high-school principal from one of 
our smaller towns entered a summer-school course 
in Anglo-Saxon; before the end of the term he re- 

169 



170 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

vealed his motive. "Several years ago," he said, 
we dropped Latin, when the University ceased to 
require it, and substituted German. Now we are 
dropping German, — and, don't you think, for the 
sake of knowledge of English, we ought to put in 
Anglo-Saxon?" Of course, the man was but one 
of God's fools misplaced; but his state of mind 
illustrates the primary responsibility of the college, 
and shows, too, that his folly was not altogether of 
his own making. Clearly, the whole question must 
be handled from the college point of view. 

And what, from the college point of view, is the 
value of the study of foreign language? There are 
a number of trite answers, most of which, judged by 
the test of time, have proved unconvincing. The 
oldest and worst of these is that the study is dis- 
ciplinary, that no matter how little mastery is at- 
tained by the pursuit of language study it has some- 
how exalted the individual's power of clear think- 
ing. As a matter of fact there is nothing of this 
kind in foreign-language study comparable in value 
or effect with the study of mathematics or logic or 
a rigorous English grammar; while, on the other 
hand, it is the disciplinary conception that has vir- 
tually killed the pursuit of the classical languages 
for the upgrowing generation. Again, it is urged 
that the study of foreign languages aids mastery 
of English; and this is in a measure true, though 
not economically true. To study either Latin or 
French (which are the most helpful of foreign 



FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 171 

tongues in this respect) for the betterment of one's 
Enghsh is very much like going to Rome in order to 
arrive at London : the best and surest path to an 
acquaintance with one's own tongue is a deep famil- 
iarity with its native literature. 

Again, and more tellingly, there is the practical 
reason, of acquiring a language for use. We cer- 
tainly desire scholars and scientists in our nation, if 
we desire to remain among the civilized. But no 
scholar or scientist can expect to attain a first place 
in his subject if he have not a usable acquaintance 
with Latin, French, and German ; and in the not dis- 
tant future Italian and a number of other modern 
tongues will be in the same category. This is recog- 
nized in our best schools, where knowledge of these 
languages is requisite to the attainment of the high- 
est degree, that of doctor of philosophy. Next in 
importance to the scholarly and scientific need is the 
commercial. Here it commonly extends but to the 
acquisition of one foreign tongue; and what that 
shall be is largely predetermined by the intention of 
the student. Unquestionably, where the intention is 
not for a definitely foreseen career, French is the 
most valuable of foreign tongues, being virtually 
the lingua franca of the civilized world. After 
French, for Americans, Spanish is first in value, 
not only because of our Spanish-speaking posses- 
sions, but because of our necessarily growing inter- 
course with our southern neighbors. German 
would fall in a third place in this series, and there 



172 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

is some probability that Russian may soon pass it 
in importance. Besides the scholarly and the com- 
mercial, a third practical support of language study 
is the increasing significance of our diplomatic rep- 
resentation. The diplomatic service will never, of 
course, engage a large proportion of the educated; 
but it will certainly offer careers of increasing at- 
tractiveness to young men gifted for it, and in that 
gift there must be an aptitude for foreign tongues. 
Combined, these practical reasons are alone suffi- 
cient to ensure the continuance of foreign-language 
study in our higher schools; they are not, however, 
sufficient to justify the requirement of language 
study of any student who knows his own mind in 
the matter. The real crux of the language question 
is elsewhere. 

It has been phrased by Lord Bryce, in a recent 
address, perspicaciously. Education is a response 
to our natural human curiosity, our desire to know. 
Knowledge is broadly of two kinds, — of men and 
of nature, of human thought and of the human en- 
vironment. It is to science that we turn for the 
latter kind of knowledge; science is our key to na- 
ture. It is to the humanities that we turn, and must 
turn, for our knowledge of men, and for our partici- 
pation in the whole complexitiy of that subtle 
hereditament which we name civilization. The 
humanities, in widest sense, mean knowledge of 
books ; and we might truly say that the laboratory 
and the library are the material emblems of these 



FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 173 

two fundamental branches of the tree of knowledge. 

Now knowledge of books is a matter of reading 
(which needs to be said only because it is so often 
forgotten) ; and reading is an art which can be 
profitably pursued only by those who have acquired 
the power to select, — just as the laboratory is useful 
only to those who understand its instruments. Nor 
is the making of a good reader less arduous than is 
the making of a good experimentalist; it presup- 
poses not merely a continual training, but also some 
natural calling. Granted the taste and the indus- 
try, there remains but the opening up of the priv- 
ilege of books, — and this is what the liberal college 
aims to provide. 

The privilege of books, in any meaningful sense, 
is the privilege of the best books. Many of these 
(and may the praise of posterity long be to their 
makers!) are in the English tongue, by right of cre- 
ation; but many more are in other languages, lan- 
guages which must be learned — partially, as lan- 
guages are always learned — in order that they may 
be partially understood. I know, of course, that 
the English-speaking world is now rich in transla- 
tions of foreign masterpieces, and many of them 
superb translations; and I know that a very great 
treasure may be derived from the study of these 
works in translation: if any question this, one need 
but mention King James's Version, and he is an- 
swered. But it is also true, as everyone who has 
ever really caught the spirit of a foreign tongue will 



174 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

attest, that at the best a translation is but a pale 
reflection of its original ; or if (as at times happens) 
it better the original, it is essentially another work. 
It is hard to say this convincingly; but if we accept 
Lord Bryce's criterion, that the best judge is the 
man who has first made the acquaintance of a work 
in translation and has afterwards learned to know 
it in the original, we shall discover that the testi- 
mony to the worth of the effort is virtually unani- 
mous. 

Nor should it be necessary to repeat the obvious 
in saying that we do not make acquaintance with 
the ideas expressed in a foreign tongue merely for 
their formal (or, as a scholastic might say it, their 
intellective) value : the power of a conception comes 
from the vigor of the context in which it is set, and 
a main part of that context is inevitably conveyed 
by the color of its native dialect. Philosophy, be- 
cause it seeks the universal, should suffer less than 
other types of literature from this defect; but even 
in Jowett's splendid English something of his nat- 
ural glory is faded from Plato. 

It is for the sake of literature, and knowledge of 
literature, that we encourage the study of foreign 
languages, as an essential part of a humanistic edu- 
cation; nor has the study any other justification be- 
sides knowledge of literature which will perpetuate 
it beyond the bare limits of practical necessity. But 
it needs no other. Literature — imaginative, politi- 
cal, historical, philosophical — is a thing of such su- 



FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 175 

preme importance to civilization that every effort 
and every premium we can give to the cultivation of 
its tradition is but small measure of its value; and 
I mean by this value, not merely its returns to the 
individual who acquires the knowledge, but its far 
richer returns to the whole society in which that 
individual lives. Colleges exist for the training of 
literate citizens, for the reason that literate citizens 
are indispensable to the good state. 

II 

But, the value of foreign-language study con- 
ceded, there remains the question what language or 
languages are the best selection for him who would 
be both an educated man and a qualified American 
citizen. No average mortal can expect to become 
intimately familiar with more than two or three 
languages including his own (which requires honest 
study for its mastery quite as distinctly as do for- 
eign tongues). Here, in the problem of selection, 
is our real difficulty, for it is here that differences 
of opinion are real; on the general question of the 
retention of some foreign-language study the sense 
of the community is virtually a determined affirma- 
tive. 

The problem of selection itself may be approached 
from several different angles, even when the ap- 
praisal is to be made purely with reference to liter- 
ary values (literature in the broad sense which in- 
cludes historical and speculative as well as aesthetic 



176 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

writings). There is, first, the educationally practi- 
cal question of economy of time, or of returns in 
attainment for effort expended — a question of no 
small importance when curricula are crowded with 
subjects as is the case today. There is, second, the 
question of the intrinsic values of the literatures in- 
volved, that is, as to which bodies of human expres- 
sion in foreign tongues are best worth while. There 
is, third, the related, but rather more psychological 
question, of the qualities of languages as forms of 
expression, and hence as to the particular tone which 
each can give to the learner's thought and expres- 
sion. Each of these questions has ramifications, 
which I shall endeavor to suggest, taking them in 
order. 

The question of what languages are most eco- 
nomical, yielding the surest return for the effort 
expended, must be considered both from the point 
of view of the teaching and the learning. It is en- 
tirely clear that the profit of pursuing the study of 
a foreign tongue is in great measure determined by 
the proficiency with which it is taught. This, in 
itself, operates as a practical limitation of under- 
graduate choices. In the University of Nebraska 
choice for lower classmen is limited to Latin, Greek, 
French, German, Italian, Spanish, and certain Scan- 
dinavian and Slavonic languages. It is quite con- 
ceivable that a man might enter the University pre- 
ferring Hebrew or Chinese — and for very good 
reasons — to any of these; but the fact that these 



FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 177 

languages are not taught would bar him from their 
profitable study. This aspect becomes one of great 
importance when we turn from actual college courses 
to high-school preparation for colleges ; for very few 
of our preparatory schools teach more than two 
non-English tongues. This matter of preparation 
is of prime importance to the learner: a language 
once begun is a language to pursue, be the beginning 
in the home or the school. The main reason for 
the undergraduate teaching of Danish, Swedish, 
and Bohemian is that so many of our youth have a 
partial acquaintance with these tongues from their 
parents; and this is also the main reason for the 
emphasis that has been laid upon German in Ne- 
braska. It is a perfectly good reason, from the 
point of view of economy of effort, just as, from 
the same point of view, it is wise to advise a boy 
who has begun Latin or German in the high school 
to continue with the same language in college, until 
he has a usable acquaintance with it. 

Apart from such consideration the question of 
economy resolves into one of difficulty and aptitude. 
The charge of excessive difficulty is one of the over- 
used arguments against the classical languages. If 
it be merely a matter of learning to read texts, it is 
true that French or German is easier to learn to read, 
for the boy of average aptitude, than is Latin or 
Greek. But if we add the requirements of conversa- 
tional acquaintance in the modern tongue, which is 
usually urged as a large factor in its value, then the 



178 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

scale of difficulty almost certainly tips in the other 
direction : it is easier to learn to read either classical 
language than it is to learn to read and speak fluently 
either modern tongue, — that is, for the average boy 
knowing only his mother tongue to start with. Fur- 
ther, it is certainly easier to get effective preparatory 
teaching in Latin than in modern languages; partly 
because it is a language read and not spoken and 
partly because long experience has reduced its teach- 
ing to something like pedagogical precision. Again, 
a small acquaintance with Latin is of more general 
value than is a small acquaintance with any other 
language, — I refer to Latin grammar and to certain 
elementary forms of expression current with Eng- 
lish; so that, on the whole, if but a single year could 
be devoted to language study Latin is by all means 
the language to recommend. Of modern languages, 
French, by common experience, is the easiest for the 
unprepared American to acquire, and judged by the 
test of economy, it should properly stand next to 
Latin in the high-school curriculum. It may be re- 
peated here, as said above, that it is also these two 
languages that are of most service for the better- 
ment of the student's English — which may surely be 
regarded as an added economy. 

On the whole, a judgment of foreign tongues 
with respect to their literary significance (for the 
American citizen) fortifies this evaluation. Liter- 
atures must be judged for the complete range of 
their expression, historical and political as well as 



FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 179 

aesthetic and philosophical. No sane critic will deny 
that for aesthetic and philosophical value alone no 
literature equals the Greek; nor will any sound 
critic question the fact that Latin owns a similar 
primacy in the domain of history and politics, while 
it m.ay be regarded as a strong rival for the second 
place with respect to artistic and philosophical sig- 
nificance. It is probable that even now there are 
more books and documents in Latin than in any 
other language, taking the world over; and Latin 
possesses the unique value of opening to the student 
two of the greatest periods of human history — the 
period of pagan and imperial Rome and the great 
period of mediaeval Christianity. Second to Latin, 
in all respects, stands French. It succeeded Latin 
as the language of diplomacy; it became, and still 
is, the model of polite letters; it contains more books 
of first importance — many of them, as the works of 
Leibnitz and Rosseau, written by men who were not 
born Frenchmen — than any other modern tongue; 
and its literature embraces a greater range of ideas 
significant for civilization than does that of any 
other modern tongue. From the point of view of 
literary art, French is, with Latin, a rival for the 
second place after Greek; and as a language of great 
prose, in spite of the fact that the greatest of prose 
writers, Plato, was a Greek, French is more impor- 
tant than is Greek. 

In this evaluation I have not considered English; 
I have contemplated only foreign languages. But 



180 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

in order to appraise the whole group of study lan- 
guages' with which a student may hope to make ac- 
quaintance, it is worth while to set English in the 
measure. If we take as a measure the poetic mas- 
ters in a language concerning whose position critics 
are virtually agreed, Greek, again, obtains a tri- 
umphant first place, with Homer and the three tra- 
gedians in a class for which the only later candidates 
are Virgil, a Latin, Dante, an Italian, and Shakes- 
peare and Milton, two English poets. In a second 
class, which should still include ''world poets" (if 
the term be not too vague) the Greeks are numer- 
ous ; Horace is the most conspicuous Latin, Petrarch, 
the Italian; France is represented not only by her 
three classical dramatists, but properly also by the 
mediaeval authors of the romantic cycles; Germany, 
by Goethe; while England is dubiously represented 
by Byron, — in a place which, in my opinion, ought 
to belong to Shelley. From a mere regard of su- 
preme masters — Homer, Dante, Shakespeare — 
Greek, Italian, and English are pre-eminent. But a 
language is not school-learned for the sake of a 
single author, no matter what his mastership; liter- 
atures must be taken as wholes. And again, there 
is some artificiality in comparing the ancient with 
the modern. In a quite precise sense, the literatures 
of modern languages are represented by the vernacu- 
lar books of the last three centuries, and taking 
these, all in all, French, English, and German (in 
the order named unless the weight of the two great 
English poets may put English first) are the literary 



FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 181 

as well as the scholarly tongues of the western 
world. German literature became important at a 
period (the middle of the eighteenth century) con- 
siderably later than either of the others, and it 
suffers somewhat in comparison from the fact that 
so much of its significant work is so in a scholarly 
rather than an sesthetic sense ; so that on the whole, 
it is for the sake of scholarship that its study is of 
chief importance to the American of today. 

There still remains for consideration the third 
standard of evaluation, with respect to the qualities 
of languages as instruments of thought and expres- 
sion. This is a field in which it is easy to become 
mired in thick dispute; many of the proffered rea- 
sons are really but prepossessions. Thus, there is 
the traditional (since Renaissance times) assump- 
tion that there is some special virtue in a complexity 
of inflectional ^forms, an assumption proceedirig 
from the fact that the classical tongues are highly 
inflected. A similar virtue is often urged for Ger- 
man, namely its power of word- formation by a 
process which is essentially agglutination. As a mat- 
ter of fact, it may be reasonably argued that both in- 
flection and agglutination are marks of primitive- 
ness and awkwardness in speech. The general trend 
of Indo-European tongues has been from inflec- 
tional to analytical forms of expression, and this 
is as true of Hindustani and modern Persian 
as it is of French and English — all of them 
highly analytic forms of speech. Such a tendency, 



182 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

setting in with the beginnings of modern civihza- 
tion and keeping equal pace with the advance of 
general culture, ought surely to be regarded as a 
sign of linguistic progress, rather than decadence; 
and if so regarded, English, as the most analytical 
of Occidental tongues w^ould be viewed as the most 
developed, with French a close second. By the same 
standard, German would be more belated than are 
the Romance languages, or than are most of the 
Teutonic dialects. 

But the true tests of linguistic perfection are the 
logical and aesthetic qualities of languages, that is, 
the range of ideas and the grace of expression of 
which they are capable. These are qualities exceed- 
ingly difficult to identify apart from the fact of their 
presentation in actual w^orks, — logic is a fact of 
effective philosophical and scientific waiting, grace 
is the fact of poetic style. If there be any general 
criterion of the range of ideas of which a language 
is capable, that criterion must be the size of its vo- 
cabulary. Words which are living words are expres- 
sions of distinctions, and that tongue which owns 
the greatest body of words is the one which knows 
the most distinctions. This we realize the moment 
we contrast the vocabulary of a civilized tongue with 
that of a savage speech; the difference in the range 
of ideas is just what makes the one civilized and the 
other savage. J^idged by this standard alone, Eng- 
lish is by far the richest of languages, being as pre- 
eminent in the modern world as was Greek in the 



FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 183 

ancient. However, it would be dangerous to assume 
that quantity of speech-material is the sole criterion 
of effectiveness, or that there are any important 
conceptions untranslatable from one modern tongue 
to another; and we know, as a matter of fact, that 
the agglutinative genius of German, enabling the 
ready and picturesque formation of words, is a fair 
compensation for its lesser, as it were, official 
vocabulary. 

The final test of linguistic excellence is grace, the 
capacity for an elevated style. This is the quality 
which it is peculiarly the function of genius to de- 
velop and make manifest: as Longinus phrases it, 
sublimity of style is the echo of a noble mind; and it 
is, therefore, peculiarly indiscerptible from the 
masterpieces in which it is present. Nevertheless, 
tliere are certain indications of a purely linguistic 
character by which the grace of a tongue may in a 
way be defined. Euphony is one of these indica- 
tions, determined by both the sounds that enter into 
the composition of words and the rhythms of verbal 
phrase. From the point of view of the singer, the 
vowel is everything; and if singing-quality alone 
were to be taken into account, Italian and Nor- 
wegian would carry the palm among modern Euro- 
pean tongues. But it is a mistake to identify linguis- 
tic euphony with musical quality in this artificially 
musical sense; modern languages are not primarily 
singing languages, nor are men birds. Swinburne, 
it is said, could not tolerate the art of music, and 



184 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

Swinburne is the greatest recent master of English 
euphony. The quaHties that go to make the Hterary 
euphony of which he and other great writers are 
masters are the quahties of articulation and modula- 
tion in sound, coupled with range and flexibility of 
rhythm. Excellence in these characters depends not 
only upon vowel but also upon consonantal variety, 
and again upon what I should call the cleanness of 
the sound elements — that is, upon absence of gut- 
terals and nasals and moderation of sibilants. 
Greek is certainly the model language in such sonant 
excellence, and among modern European tongues, I 
should again rank English first : English has long 
outgrown the gutterals which still deform German; 
it is badly w^eighted with sibilants (its greatest eu- 
phonic defect), but they are dominantly less ob- 
noxious than the German combinations of stops and 
sibilants, which give a mouthy awkwardness to Ger- 
man; while, as compared with French, our sibilants 
are fairly offsets by their nasalizations. With re- 
spect to rhythm, English is again first. Rhythmic 
freedom is partly dependent upon syllabic accent, 
but mainly upon syntactical freedom; and in re- 
spect to syntactical freedom analytical languages 
possess great advantages, — and English certainly is 
the freest of all. French, through its loss of formal 
accent, loses in range, though it gains in rhythmic 
subtlety, and is in this sense the fair complement, as 
it has been the honored teacher, of English. All 
in all, for sonant articulation and rhythmic flexi- 



FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 185 

bility English is the first of modern tongues, at least 
among the western European. Spanish is, in my 
judgment, its nearest peer, and German certainly 
the most backward of the great western languages. 

But grace of speech is by no means merely a mat- 
ter of euphony. The variety of relational forms — 
pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, verbal auxil- 
iaries, etc.; the number and quality of the idioms; 
the development of diction levels, from the concrete 
and homely to the archaic, poetic, and abstract; — 
all these are crucial factors in the instrumental 
beauty of languages. English is a backward lan- 
guage in the first respect, its weakness in relational 
forms being made awkwardly emphatic by its weak- 
ness in the range of gender forms and usages; in 
the other two particulars, the closely connected 
qualities of idiomatic and dictional variety, it is a 
very advanced language. It is virtually unique 
among European tongues in being a double lan- 
guage, both in respect to vocabulary and idiomatic 
structure ; for in English the Teutonic and Romance 
elements are, as it were, wedded like man and wife, 
each preserving its individual distinction, while the 
two are yet one in their mutual co-operation and 
sympathy. This is an advantage so huge that it 
outweighs all defects, and makes of English an in- 
strument of the intelligence superior to Greek itself. 

English being so composed, the fundamentally 
important question is from what linguistic sources 
may it be most beneficially influenced; especially. 



186 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

has it most to gain from Teutonic or from Romance 
influences? This question is partly answered by 
experience and may be further answered by reason. 
In the past the great assimilations have been of the 
Romance element by the Teutonic. French and 
Latin have given English nearly the whole of its 
polite and lettered discourse; word and idiom alike 
have been freely assimilated, to such an extent, in- 
deed, that one might almost say that our tongue 
has been habituated to French forms of speech as 
our bodies are habituated to French forms of cloth- 
ing; we take on both with native unconsciousness. 
German, on the other hand, has offered the most 
stubborn and awkward materials for adoption. It 
is difficult to acclimate even a German word in 
English speech, while all of the efforts that have 
been made to reproduce Germanic literary modes in 
our tongue have been experimental and fruitless. 
Both Spanish and Italian have been vastly more 
influential upon English speech than has German. 
Nor is there any reason to anticipate a change in this 
respect. The Teutonic foundation of English is 
limited to the homely and very finite range of sensu- 
ous affairs, concerned, as a philosopher might say, 
with the vegetative and passional functions of the 
soul; the classical and Romance expansion of the 
tongue has been almost wholly an affair of the in- 
tellective soul, descriptive of things of the mind. 
German itself, in ante-bellum days, drew liberally 
upon these same sources for similar service. But 



FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 187 

it is exactly in respect to things of the mind that 
civiHzation grows and must continue to grow. We 
make no rash assumption, therefore, in insisting that 
it is of the utmost importance, for the heahh of our 
mother tongue, that she continue her wholly fruit- 
ful intimacy with the classical tongues and their 
offspring. 

The upshot of the whole matter is that viewed 
from every angle, the foreign languages best worth 
cultivation, for the sake of literature, are the classi- 
cal and Romance tongues, and in particular, Latin, 
French, and Greek. I put them in this order, for 
this is the order in which I should recommend them 
to a student asking my advice. If it should be 
asked what language I would make fourth, I should 
say German; for while I regard Dante and Cer- 
vantes as more significant figures than Goethe, in 
the whole of European literature, yet the great 
scholastic and scientific literature of Germany gives 
to German an unimpeachable preference as com- 
pared with Italian and Spanish. Furthermore, the 
student who has learned French and Latin will ac- 
quaint himself with Italian and Spanish with mini- 
mum effort. 

Ill 

A phase of the question of foreign-language study 
to which I wish to advert briefly is its social and 
political value. In the broad view, higher education 
is encouraged in states because it is valuable to the 



188 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

States, and not merely a private advantage to indi- 
viduals. Language study is a feature of curricula 
for the same sound reason. It is advantageous to 
the community to have in its midst men familiar 
with what has been thought in the historic past and 
with what is being thought in the living present, 
the world over. This advantage alone would call 
for the widest range of language study which we 
can make effective; and I certainly hope that the 
near future will see, not only the languages of 
western Europe, but those of eastern Asia, subjects 
of college encouragement. A capable Chinese 
scholar is an ornament to any community, and a 
thoroughly useful citizen. 

But there is still another, and possibly subtler 
reason, for encouraging the cultivation of variety 
in foreign-language study. The United States has 
been called '*the Melting Pot," which can only mean 
that the amalgam from which the future American 
citizen is to be cast will not be precisely of the color 
of any of the metals cast into the crucible. We 
cannot expect this future citizen to be melted down 
to the hue of the Revolutionary Anglo-Saxon, nor, 
I think, should we wish it. Rather — if we have that 
faith in our common humanity which we so vocifer- 
ously express — we should hope to derive some essen- 
tial brilliance from each element added to the 
compound. 

Such result will be best attained if we permit and 
encourage each immigrational wave to bring with it 



FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 189 

and to cultivate the best that it has originated in its 
first home; and that best — we can say it without 
hesitation — will be found in its noblest literature. 
Familiarity with the best that has been expressed 
in every human tongue — that is a social good for 
which we can well afford to expend time, money, 
and effort ; and it is a good which the United States, 
as a community, may attain with perhaps less effort 
than any other great nation, just because our popu- 
lation is an undispersed Babel. Traditions are not 
made in a day, and traditions which are ideals puri- 
fied out of centuries of experience are treasures not 
to be disregarded. Our task should be, by every 
reasonable means, to encourage the preservation of 
the best in the ideals of all peoples who come to 
us ; and this can most effectively be done by keeping 
alive in them the knowledge of the best in their 
native literatures. 

I think, of course, that we should insist that the 
study of English — language, literature, history — be 
made primary in every form of the education of 
the American citizen; and I am in favor of laws 
prohibiting parochial or other private education in 
exclusively foreign tongues or without state super- 
vision. But it would be social imbecility not to keep 
alive and vigorous the pursuit of the broadest pos- 
sible range of literary studies. 



Ill 

COMMUNITY PAGEANTRY 



• COMMUNITY PAGEANTRY 

OPEN-AIR performances, combining music and 
drama and spectacle, which have come to be 
known as pageants, are of recent and rapidly grow- 
ing popularity in the United States. To be sure, 
for a long time past, springtide dances and masques 
and processions, with a setting of campus greenery 
and college halls, have been annual features of col- 
lege life, especially in the women's colleges such as 
Vassar and Wellesley and Bryn Mawr. And in 
recent years, too, the open-air rendering of Greek 
and Shakespearean drama, familiar>ized by such 
troupes as the Ben Greet and Coburn players, has 
been seized upon by the colloges as at once educa- 
tional and beautiful; so that now several of our uni- 
versities possess their outdoor theaters. But the 
pageant proper, while it has undoubtedly been pre- 
pared for and in a way introduced by the colleges, 
nevertheless has a character and source of its own. 
The real source of the pageant and the real cause 
of its popularity is the nation-wide dawning of our 
sense of history and national individuality. No 
doubt the colleges have shown us the way. No 
doubt, too, the discovery of God's outdoors, of 

193 



194 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

which the screened porch, the automobile picnic, and 
the boy scout are so many parallel symptoms, has 
given an added tug in the direction which the cam- 
pus spectacle indicated. But under and beyond these 
lies the fact of an inner discovery, an inner appetite 
— the discovery that as a people we have an inter- 
esting history and that it is one containing incidents 
that may be made to minister to that hunger for 
idealization which is the noblest desire of mankind. 

Hence it is that all over the country during the 
past few years the historical and symbolical pageant 
has appeared to commemorate the past and intimate 
the future of locality and city and state, creating 
at once a new poetry and a new patriotism not 
merely for the youth in college, but for the whole 
community. The American pageant of today is an 
expression of the life and the ideals of the people 
as a whole, each center, in utilizing its own nearer 
and dearer traditions, contributing its local share to 
what is fast becoming a deeper and truer national 
sense than ever we have had before — deeper and 
truer because more consciously and thoughtfully 
ideal. 

The fact that a pageant is the work of a whole 
community is perhaps as important as the fact that 
it is a creative work. To be successfully produced 
it calls for administrative and executive abilities 
as well as for musical, literary, dramatic and other 
artistic powers. It demands the co-operation not 
merely of the committee members but of many 



COMMUNITY PAGEANTRY 195 

whose names are not printed on the bills, people 
who contribute ideas, reminiscences, properties in 
the shape of old-time garbs, and indeed that atmos- 
phere of interest without which the thing is impos- 
sible. Money is required, and accommodating 
merchants are put to unprofitable pains to secure 
just the goods needed for this color effect or that 
appurtenance. By the time the whole work is com- 
plete a multitude have had a share in it. 

No doubt the size of the community interested 
somewhat affects the generality of the feeling of 
participation. Such gigantic affairs as the St. Louis 
pageant or that given by the city of Newark involve 
a large financial outlay and a more or less profes- 
sional character in the preparation. Indeed, the 
business of the "pageant director" has already 
sprung into existence, while professional poets are 
engaged to compose for such occasions. At the 
other extreme is such a performance as the Fourth 
of July historical pageant where the only bill turned 
in to the Bertrand Social Center club, which 
had the spectacle in charge, was for grease-paint 
for make-up. The pride of such small places is a 
notable factor in pageant success, which recipro- 
cally increases the pride. Where the pageant does 
succeed in the community sense, there is surely a 
richer reward than any possible financial gain. For 
the art of pageantry is in every sense a popular 
art. A pageant that is produced by a community 
not only presents a pleasing aesthetic spectacle, for 



196 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

the enjoyment of all, but it educates the native 
talent of the place, in the use of color and language, 
in dramatic acting, in beautiful dancing, in musician- 
ship. It makes education in art significant to the 
people by promising an opportunity for the display 
and exercise of every natural gift, and by creating 
confidence in the community's power to entertain 
itself. It has long been our national custom, from 
New York City to Quimby's Corners, to receive 
our theatrical and musical entertainments with a 
stamp of foreign manufacture and European ap- 
proval. The American pageant promises not only 
to develop a native art, but at the same time a native 
and independent sense of what is good and bad in 
art. 

Calling for so many and such complex talents 
and appealing not to a private purse but to a public 
interest, the pageant is not produced simply and eas- 
ily. It demands a great deal of gratis interest and 
free work from a great number of persons. A comi- 
mittee must be organized, first of all to insure the 
finances, which are always precarious and some- 
times at the mercy of so uncertain a matter as the 
weather (for the pageant having few performances 
runs risks not to be met by entertainments that take 
the road). Then there must be another committee 
to supervise the staging — building the scene, train- 
ing the performers, etc., all requiring abilities of a 
very special order. The advertising must be looked 
after, and, as it has become the very appropriate 



COMMUNITY PAGEANTRY 197 

custom to advertise primarily by means of an artis- 
tic poster, an artist able to create this must be 
found. Artistic taste is called for, also, in inventing 
the figures of the dances and the. stage pictures, of 
which a special phase is the costuming. Last of 
mention, though its work falls earliest, is the sub- 
committee having in charge the book and music; it 
is their task to work out a controlling idea for the 
piece and give it a suitable text and accompani- 
ment. 

The subject or theme of a pageant is commonly 
and naturally connected with local history. Hardly 
a community in the United States, large or small, 
but possesses plenty of material in the way of past 
events interesting enough and significant enough 
to form many such themes. Of course the older 
communities have the richer and more varied past, 
and it is quite natural that the first and most enthusi- 
astic pageant givers have been the towns of New 
England with their (for America) old traditions 
and those of California with their picturesque 
histories. But human life is a rich mine of dramatic 
materials, wherever it is lived, and even the young 
towns of Nebraska have much in their pasts that 
only needs to be properly expressed to be found full 
of meaning and inspiration. 

For strictly historical events the most interesting 
form of presentation is the dramatic. Outdoor 
drama is more difificult to "carry across" than indoor 
stage performances, for the reason that the illusion 



198 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

of the footlights, stagecraft, cannot be so complete, 
and for the added reason that the audience will be 
farther from the actors and less able to follow 
closely their expression. Pageant drama, accord- 
ingly must depend as much as possible upon the 
grouping and action and as little as may be upon the 
text. . On the other hand, it is greatly helped by the 
familiarity which the audience may be supposed 
to possess with the theme treated — just the familiar- 
ity which in ancient days made Greek drama pos- 
sible to outdoor audiences of many thousands. 

But in addition to the dramatic scenes allegory 
is used. Even historical materials are occasionally 
susceptible of allegorical treatment, or invite that 
exclusively, but usually the allegorical scenes are 
symbolical in character. The hopes and aspirations 
of the community can very properly be represented 
in this fashion — such themes as the mingling of 
races, the search for human progress, the depend- 
ence of man's life upon agriculture, all these and 
many more may be made beautiful by poetry and 
music, dance and pantomime. And thus it is that 
allegory forms the very appropriate beginning and 
end, interlude, too, if desired, for an historical piece. 

Everywhere in the country Indian themes have 
been employed in the pageants presented. Partly, 
no doubt, this is due to the picturesqueness of the 
Indian. Partly it is due to the fact that the his- 
tory of each community harks back to its Indian 
days. Partly it is just the expression and badge of 



COMMUNITY PAGEANTRY 199 

the instinctive Americanism that inspires the pageant 
movement; the art of the pageant is an art of 
America and it demands the Indian as a sign of its 
authenticity. 

But there is a deeper and finer reason which is 
sure sooner or later to come to the surface why the 
Indian subject is especially appropriate for pagean- 
try. To begin with the Indian is a human being 
like the white man ; strip off his beads and feathers 
and get into his thought and it will be found that 
he thinks and feels, not perhaps as does the white 
man in his workaday apparel, but as does the white 
man stripped of weights and measures, his business 
appointments, and his coins. Human nature has a 
common fund at the bottom, which all men share, 
and the big part of this common fund is a love of 
the poetry of that other and greater nature into 
which man's life is made to fit. Somehow the In- 
dfan seems to see this world nature — here in Amer- 
ica at least, perhaps because it was so long exclus- 
ively his America — in a more clear-eyed fashion 
than his civilized brother ; and so it is that his myths 
and legends abound with the simple and universal 
truths that appeal to all men. Coupled with the pic- 
turesqueness of the Indian, this quality of poetic 
truth in his thought and imaginings make of his 
tribal lore an unfailing fount of poetic allegory. 

As I have intimated, the growth of the pageant 
is a phase of that more universal discovery of out- 
door nature, which is soon to redeem Americans 



200 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

from the epithet, never quite deserved, of ''dollar 
worshipers." The pageant is capable of being made 
one of the great attractions of the social life of the 
people, and if it be conceived sincerely and nobly it 
can easily become a most precious part of that social 
life. If we love beauty in our surroundings, as all 
do, why should we not use every available means of 
making life beautiful? Surely, the pageant is such 
a means, and it is worth remembering that the sense 
of beauty grows with cultivation, that just in so far 
as we create beautiful things we increase our powers 
of appreciating beauty. The great advantage of a 
community art is that it educates all while it grati- 
fies all. 

The outdoor theater, as everyone knows, is 
Greek in origin. Not everyone is aware that the 
Greek theater and drama, and thence our modern 
theater and opera, grew directly out of a type of 
performance identical in its elements with the mod- 
ern American pageant. Greek drama sprung up in 
a generation from a primitve yearly celebration of 
the legends of heroic days and allegories of the 
gods. Like our pageants, these were outdoor per- 
formances. There were choruses that sang and 
danced ; there were rhapsodes that recited and actors 
that acted the deeds of old. A little later great 
artists like Aeschylus and Sophocles seized upon 
these materials and produced Greek tragedy. Aes- 
chylus added a second actor to the leader of the 
primitive chorus, says Aristotle, and he introduced 



COMMUNITY PAGEANTRY 201 

scene-painting; Sophocles increased the number of 
actors to three, and made the performance more 
dramatic and less choric. It was only after these 
men that permanent stone theaters were built — built 
because they had created a drama demanding a per- 
manent stage, and a literature which has been the 
model and inspiration of Europe ever since. 

If ever America is to find that native art which 
has been so long hoped for and so disappointingly 
delayed, it will come, I believe, through some such 
source as the pageant. The pageant is democratic, 
like the spirit of our institutions; it is kept close to 
the interests and feelings of all citizens, while it 
represents those interests and feelings which are 
least selfish and most ideal ; it endeavors to symbolize 
and so make vivid the spirit of our communities as 
wholes ; and in reclaiming the traditions of the past 
it is gradually bringing, as it w^ere, to the surface of 
our aesthetic consciousness those historical materials 
and ideal themes which must one day form the sub- 
stance of a national art. 



EDUCATION IN TASTE 
IV 



EDUCATION IN TASTE 

IN an address delivered at the two hundred and 
fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Harvard, 
James Russell Lowell characterized the aim of the 
college and the ideal of its education : 

Let it be our hope to make a gentleman of every youth who 
is put under our charge ; not a conventional gentleman, but 
a man of culture, a man of intellectual resource, a man of 
public spirit, a man of refinement, with that good taste which 
is the conscience of the miud, and that conscience which is the 
good taste of the soul/ 

Good taste is the conscience of the mind. Lowell's 
definition is compact of thought, and is worth 
dwelling upon. Good taste is a trait we all agree in 
valuing, though its meaning is as a rule rather 
vaguely felt; we urge its cultivation and admire 
its exercise, but the quality itself is generally less 
analyzed than desired. Such a pithy phrase as 
Lowell's, then, is a not unwelcome reminder of a 
duty that we owe to our self -under standing, es- 
pecially when it is set up as an important factor in 

*For an interesting discussion of the sources of Lowell's 
conception see Wm. Guild Howard, "Good Taste and Con- 
science," Publications of the Modern Language Association 
of America, XXV., 3. 

205 



206 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

our ideal of educational attainment. What, indeed, 
is this good taste that we set such store by? And 
in what degree is its cultivation a proper end of the 
teacher's task? These are questions which should 
be considered before we come to the more practical 
problems of ways and means. 

First, then, what is good taste, precisely defined? 
The term comes into English, I doubt not, from the 
French le bon gout, and so rests upon the Latin 
gustus for its ultimate. The term is, of course, a 
trope, based upon the physical sensation of a flavor 
upon the tongue ; and at first glance the figure seems 
not to carry us very far. But metaphors of this 
sort, especially when deep-seated and long-used, if 
narrowly examined will usually be found to convey 
some subtle and exacting truth, and I think the 
similitude of taste is transferred from the usage of 
the tongue to that of an ideal sensibility not without 
its own good reason. To begin with, of the five 
physical senses that of taste is by far the most un- 
equivocally subjective and idiosyncratic. "I like" 
and 'T dislike," applied to savors, are as near ulti- 
mates as any human judgments; there is no court 
of appeal from the tongue and no law beyond indi- 
vidual preference. Sensations of taste are lawless 
and unchallengable as are no other sensations (as is 
well enough shown by the small vocabulary we have 
to express taste discriminations). Now this same 
subjectivism, this same idiosyncrasy of right, and 
repugnance to law, is certainly felt to hold, in some 



EDUCATION IN TASTE 207 

measure, in the realm of the more ideal discrimina- 
tions called by the same name of *'taste." The 
maxim de gustibus non est disputandum is the per- 
fect expression of this feeling. But would this 
maxim, think you, carry the same conviction were 
it framed with reference to vision or hearing, or 
even to touch or smell, instead of to taste? For we 
do assuredly dispute much about sights and sounds, 
touch gives us the primary qualities of physical 
things, while odors are not even named except with 
reference to the objects emitting them. Clearly 
the metaphor of taste conveys a fundamental anal- 
ogy from the physical to the ideal. 

Nor is this analogical freight exhausted by the 
mere subjective individuality of tastes. The sense 
of taste is not only the most subjective, it is also 
the most appetitive of the senses. Of all the senses 
it is toned by the deepest feelings of desire or an- 
tipathy. We hear, see, smell and touch objects that 
we could not endure to taste, and all in the nature of 
our daily routine. Language again bears witness 
to the sense-quality, for when we wish to describe 
the height of active enjoyment we use the word 
gusto, while the extreme of dislike is disgust. Is 
not this quality of emotional determination equally 
characteristic of those more enduring tastes which 
express ideal preferences and give color to person- 
ality? 

Thus the metaphor of taste carries with it the 
meaning of individual choice, deeply toned with at- 



208 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

traction or aversion — a court of appeal at once 
subjective and passional — which is regarded as in 
some true sense the core of that other and higher 
taste which is expressed in our ideal interests. But 
it would be to ignore the proper function of meta- 
phor to believe that the whole meaning of this 
higher type of taste is conveyed by the physical 
analogy. For one thing, the higher taste differs 
from the sense of taste in being objectively good or 
bad — for the phrase ''good taste" means objectively 
good — and in being, therefore, a subject of judg- 
ment, and hence, in some measure, of law. We rec- 
ognize this implicitly when we speak of "a person 
of taste," a phrase we should never dream of using 
with reference to merely gustatory sensations. The 
higher taste participates in idea as well as in feehng; 
it belongs to the realm of mind and is therefore, 
like all true thought, never exclusively individual, 
but in a degree social. 

All this is recognized in Lowell's definition. 
*'Good taste is the conscience of the mind." Like 
conscience, taste is inward and passional, deeply in- 
dividual and emotional ; but it is also an attribute of 
"mind," which in Lowell's intention assuredly refers 
to the realm of ideas and judgments, to those 
thoughts about things and actions which make up 
the domain of truth and right. The other half of 
Lowell's description, ''that conscience which is the 
good taste of the soul," should not escape us here; 
for, as it were by intonation, it conveys to us this 



EDUCATION IN TASTE 209 

other fact, that good taste is never far removed 
from good morals; the two are not identical, but 
they are inseparable at least in the sense that the 
best morality is harmonized by taste, which best 
morality is none other than what the Greeks would 
have it to be, a harmony of the soul. Think for a 
moment of the qualities which we associate with 
good taste : are they not quietness and sincerity and 
propriety, temperance in all things, and beyond 
these, fineness of sensibility, purity and truth? and 
are not these moral qualities ? 

Good taste, then, is partly a matter of conduct 
and ideals; it is a part of morality. Again, it is 
partly a matter of judgment and ideas, of learning 
and wisdom. In both of these particulars it is sub- 
ject to education and is a proper care of schools 
and colleges. But the more elementary factor, rep- 
resented by the term *'taste" itself, is inborn, and 
it is of the nature of an instinct and an appetite. 
Judgment, wrote Rivarol, "has never sufficed for 
the fine arts; these noble children of genius have 
required a lover rather than a judge, and this lover 
is the taste, for judgment contents itself with ap- 
proving or condemning, but the taste enjoys and 
suffers." Not the educated judgment, but the in- 
spired and fired imagination is the creator of art; 
and in some degree this inspiration is the endow- 
ment of all men. Its nature is that of love, and the 
object of its love is beauty. Love of beauty gave 
order to the kingdom of the gods, said Plato, mean- 



210 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

ing the world of nature; and it is not strange that 
human nature should respond to the world's beauty 
with some spark of the natal divinity. The task of 
the teacher is first to realize what is this love of 
beauty, to see that it be not turned nor staled by 
friendlessness. With this beginning, which nature 
has made generously ours, we may pass on to that 
development of the perfected taste which comes 
with the proper cultivation of character and judg- 
ment. For more than any other trait which it falls 
to the teacher to foster, good taste partakes of the 
whole circle of human endowment. 

In the bit of psychology which I have just under- 
taken my aim has been to indicate the character and 
place of taste in the inner organization of life. I 
have pointed out that it is a trait which touches 
both the intellectual and the moral sides of char- 
acter, and that it is developed through intellectual 
and moral training ; but that for its development it 
demands that predisposing love of beauty which is 
its vital essence and the sanction of its expression. 
I would now view the same matter from the more 
objective angle of what we philosophers call theory 
of values. 

Now values, in the broad sense, are appraisements 
in terms of "good" and ''bad." The application of 
these terms varies in intention with the human in- 
terest involved, but man is not so hopelessly com- 
plex that his interests are beyond classification. As 
a matter of fact, the classification is fairly simple. 



EDUCATION IN TASTE 211 

There are the practical interests of life, whose 
values are measured by efficiency, that is, by eco- 
nomic adaptation of energy to end; it is in this sense 
that we speak of a hammer or an apple as a "good" 
or a ''bad" hammer or apple. There are the moral 
interests of life, whose values are put in terms of 
virtue and righteousness; the "good man" is the 
virtuous man. There are the intellectual interests 
of life, represented especially by science and love of 
knowledge, and here the valuations are in terms of 
truth and error; the good argument or solution is 
the true argument or solution; science knows no 
value save true and false. Finally, there are the 
aesthetic interests of life, whose goodness is beauty 
and whose badness is ugliness; a sonata, a lyric, a 
landscape is good or bad according as it is beautiful 
or ugly, and there is no other measure. 

It is not unusual to find the moral, intellectual and 
aesthetic interests grouped together as "ideal" in- 
terests in distinction from the material and practical 
interests of the economic and bionomic world. But 
if we examine them carefully we find that a truer 
classification throws the moral and intellectual inter- 
ests into a middle group, between the practical and 
the aesthetic. For it is of the nature of the prac- 
tical interests that they find their end in employment 
and the production of change, while it is of the 
nature of aesthetic interests that they find their end 
in contemplation and the preservation of beauty; 
employment and contemplation, work and enjoy- 



212 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

ment, these are the two poles of man's experience, 
each in its place perfectly typified by the practical 
and aesthetic interests of life. The moral and the 
intellectual partake of both poles; for morality is 
both a means and an end — a means in that it is 
what makes human co-operation and hence the social 
efficiency of mankind possible, and an end in that it 
reacts to create human characters which are objects 
of contemplation, and beautiful or ugly in them- 
selves. Knowledge, too, which is the end of intel- 
lectual interest, is also both means and end, touch- 
ing at once the practical and the aesthetic; we have 
applied science and theoretic, the one existing for 
the practice of life, the other for the mind's con- 
templation; if we accept the teachings of the prag- 
matic philosophers (and some of us lean that way), 
truth itself gets its goodness from its applications 
to working interests; while, on the other hand, we 
can hardly differ from Poincare in his judgment 
that the internal harmony of the world, which it is 
the slow labor of science to discover, is the sole and 
veritable reality and the source of all beauty. Each 
in its way, the perfected human life and the per- 
fected science are works of art, though the path to 
perfection is for each the path of daily toil. 

If you assent to my analysis you will see that it 
re-enforces, from the philosophical side, what has 
been indicated by the psychological analysis of taste. 
There the love of beauty was made the source of 
taste ; here the experience of beauty is made its end. 



EDUCATION IN TASTE 213 

and it is an end which gathers into itself the ends 
of all the other interests of life — the practical, in- 
tellectual and moral, for each of them serves its end 
only in so far as it makes possible the creation and 
contemplation of beauty. 

Volumes might be written in illustration of what 
I have said, for the whole history and genius of 
mankind set it forth. Here I must be content with 
a few hints, drawn from man's long experience. 
First I would speak of philosophy, which represents 
man's maturest reflection upon his own condition. 
No student of its history can fail to be impressed by 
the constant recurrence of the conception of the con- 
templation of beauty as the final good and the suf- 
ficient reason of all things : Plato, Aristotle, Au- 
gustine, Aquinas, Bruno, Spinoza, Berkeley, all 
these bear witness to that truth which Poincare has 
so nobly expressed, that the harmony of the world 
is the sole objective reality and the source of all 
beauty. To the philosophers I should add the testi- 
mony of the philosophic poets, above all Dante and 
Milton, for whom again reverent contemplation is 
the essence of beatitude. But it is not necessary to 
draw evidence alone from men's written expres- 
sion. What human fact is more poignantly indica- 
tive of the values that endure than the price we set 
upon the potsherds of antiquity? A broken ala- 
baster from Egypt, a shattered urn from Greece — 
cast in the dump in its own day, treasure-trove in 
ours. What care is to us that Egypt of old was 



214 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

the world's granary, that Babylon ruled the world's 
commerce, Rome its politics, save that these facts made 
possible for us the carven stone, the modeled tile, 
the inscribed parchment which bear to us out of the 
past some record of human idealization, some image 
of humanly created beauty? There is a steatite vase 
found in Phsestos in Crete carved in relief with a 
procession of moving men, all vibrant with life. 
Originally the vase was covered with gold leaf, 
stripped from its surface by some barbarian who 
cast the stone to the refuse heap. To-day not thrice 
its weight in gold could buy the rejected stone, with 
its eternal image of human genius. In the alembic 
of the centuries the real goods of human life are 
refined out, and they are not found to be the eco- 
nomic and political goods which loom so big to the 
near attention; rather, they are the idealizations of 
human genius, dearer than life itself, for they ex- 
press all that is nobly enduring in life. In every 
generation there are barbarians, quick to destroy; 
but the shudder of horror which caught the civilized 
world with the mutilation of Rheims reveals to us, 
I trust, the final judgment which time will set upon 
all men who see only the near advantage, never 
the world's good. 

In what has preceded I have tried to show some- 
thing of the psychological character of taste and 
something of its philosophical object. Psychologi- 
cally, it is a form of valuation, at once intellectual 
and emotional — a conscience of the mind, as Lowell 



EDUCATION IN TASTE 215 

phrases it. Philosophically, it is a judgment of value 
which measures other values, for the reason that of 
all types of valuation its ends are more purely ends, 
complete in themselves. If this analysis is correct, 
it is plain that good taste is essential to the highest 
sanity and the mark of true cultivation. It is also 
plain that it is the first duty of the teacher to train 
the taste, in so far as may be, for the reason that no 
other form of judgment can be proportionate with- 
out a cultivated taste. We must ask, then, how far 
taste is inborn, a natural endowment, and how far 
it is subject to development through education. 

Certain facts are at once clear. If good taste has 
the qualities which I mentioned a while back, name- 
ly, quietness and sincerity and propriety, temper- 
ance, purity and truth, it is evident that a moral 
training of these traits will also be conducive to the 
development of taste, while a want of such moral 
training will hinder the development of taste. 
Lowell's antithetical phrase, "conscience is the good 
taste of the soul," is the summary of this truth. 
Moral training of some sort there always is in 
human society, yet I cannot but think that in our 
own day the teaching of morals is on a rather low 
plane of mind ; we seem to fear the stiff structure of 
its general principles, seeking to shape conduct by 
easy persuasion rather than by rigor of reason. In 
so far, the result is mere flabbiness, for it tends to 
make our morality unconscious rather than con- 
trolled and deliberate ; and it is ruinous to the taste, 



216 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

since here the moral quahty shows itself in connec- 
tion with mind, illumined with the light of reason. 

Again in the field of the practical life. Educa- 
tional propagandas nowadays are forever emphasiz- 
ing the importance of the vocation, the calling. 
But no aim beyond the vocation is given and no 
measure of values save the empty enumeration of 
dollars and cents. Unquestionably the ability and 
willingness to work effectively are essential to the 
v/ell-ordered life; therefore to excellence of judg- 
ment and soundness of taste. But we shall never in 
this world become as a people possessors of a culti- 
vated sense of beauty until our youth is taught that 
work is but a means to an end, that gold unaccom- 
panied by taste is but the advertisement of vul- 
garity, and that dollars have no good meaning save 
as symbols of the energy that can be devoted to the 
beautification of the world. Education is always a 
cost borne by an elder generation for the sake of the 
younger, and what the elder generation is willing to 
pay for, in the way of education, is the fair measure 
of what it really believes in; all other faiths are lip- 
service. Judged by this standard dollar-knowledge 
is the beau ideal of the parents of this generation, 
to their own spiritual damnation and the grievous 
hurt of their children. 

The perniciousness of the money-standard, which 
is strictly a purely arithmetical standard, in fields not 
primarily economic is illustrated in the credit-sys- 
tem, with its numbered grades, hours and courses. 



EDUCATION IN TASTE 217 

which is made the measure of education in our high 
schools and colleges. Instead of an ideal of mental 
attainment, there is set up to our youth an ideal of 
numerical balances. The manner of securing these 
becomes of slight importance; branches of learning 
are measured quantitatively — so many hours of 
"chem." equal to so many hours of ''policon.," etc. ; 
and all standards are blown to the winds. The con- 
sequence is that we have the quite absurd spectacle 
of young people "sliding through courses," as they 
put it, in naive unconsciousness of the fact that they 
are cheating themselves, their parents and the state, 
when they think that they are cheating their in- 
structors! Obviously, such an educational method 
is ruinous to sincerity and reason alike, and so is 
ruinous to the development of all true taste. 

But, you will be asking, what of the direct cultiva- 
tion of the taste? what of instruction in art? Since 
I am in a querulous mood, pointing hindrances 
rather than helps, I would indicate a certain defect 
of this instruction, as we have it to-day, before pro- 
ceeding to what I regard as its truer form. I do 
not know that I can better characterize this defect 
than by naming it a preference for the artificial 
rather than the artistic. My meaning is that we take 
our pleasure in artifice, and hence in appearance, 
rather than in the essence of beauty. Illustrations 
are numerous enough — any film theater will supply 
them (though I do not wish you to understand me 
as condemning the moving picture as a device ; good 



218 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

taste can reform even that). A still more danger- 
ous and subtle form is the prevalence of the notion 
that knowledge of art is a sort of high-toned gossip. 
This appears in polite chat, in journalistic reports 
of artist's doings, in lectures, and worst of all in col- 
lege and grade school teaching. The impression is 
conveyed that one is "up on art" when one is able to 
speak cursorily of this musician's engagements or 
that one's bad temper, or knowingly in a picture gal- 
lery of this as a "Childe Hassam" or that as "a 
Blashfield." I know of no worse bore in the world 
than the person who is *'up on art," and I know 
of no more pathetic waste of effort than the process 
of "getting one's self up" in this accomplishment — 
excepting only those school courses which teach the 
youth everything about literature excepting the ideas 
expressed in it. The truth is that this type of sham 
learning is born of pure laziness; for like all other 
things that are worth while, knowledge of beauty 
comes only as a consequence of hard work. If we 
prized the thing, we should not begrudge the work ; 
but it is not the knowledge we care for, but only 
the reputation of knowledge, and so it is that we 
pursue the short cut that leads only to sham and 
fatuity. 

Am I not already, in describing the defects of our 
education, intimating the true cultivation of taste? 
"Familiarity with the best that has been thought and 
said" is Matthew Arnold's description of the road 
to culture. Familiarity implies an intimacy that is 



EDUCATION IN TASTE 219 

beyond verbal expression, an intimacy that is a 
part of life, as family relations are a part of life, 
and that is founded on love, as family relations 
should be founded on love. Familiarity with beauty 
means that its form and expression are absorbed 
into character itself, becoming an inward and indis- 
cerptible trait. A truly cultivated taste must be 
based upon such familiarity — at once a love and a 
labor of love — with the beauties of the world, of 
nature and of human nature. 

How is it to be attained? Guidance and encour- 
agement are surely all that are necessary. All man- 
kind, I have said, are endowed with the love of 
beauty; it is as much a part of us as are eyes and 
ears. If this spontaneous love be met with intelli- 
gent sympathy, it will inevitably find its goal ; if it be 
ignored or rebuffed, it will suffer death or perver- 
sion. The teacher who would inspire the love of 
beauty must be possessed of the love of beauty and 
must be also the familiar of its truest expression. 
In addition such a teacher must also have a philos- 
ophy of life that sets the values of our various activ- 
ities in their proper perspective, and that is suscep- 
tible of clear expression. In a day such as ours, 
when the best in literature, in music and in pictures 
is everywhere available, there is small excuse for 
lack of familiarity with the artistic expression of 
beauty — and I mean by this, familiarity through the 
whole mind and soul, intellect and conscience alike. 

Further, there is the beauty of nature, God-given 



220 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

to all men. Each human being is an instrument 
capable of many and delicate adjustments to the en- 
vironing universe. No more subtle task falls to 
the teacher than the seeing that these instruments 
be brought into proper focus with nature, for the 
perfect definition of her beauties. The task is not 
a difficult one if we start with children — always 
eager of the grand adventure — and its magic is to 
be found in suggestion, which, springing from a 
spontaneous insight into beauty, arouses its response 
as spontaneously as love calls to love. 

In conclusion, I would speak once more of the 
philosophy of life — where, indeed, is the crux of 
the whole matter. The late Nathaniel Shaler 
pointed out that in the biological world there are 
whole evolutions that have no other explanations 
save the aesthetic. Forms of life arise and develop 
through eons toward some type of perfection which 
serves no end except the expression of beauty. The 
crinoids, the lilies of the sea, are such a form, he 
says; for millions of years they flourished and de- 
veloped, and finally died, crowned w^th perfect 
beauty. Shaler might also have mentioned the 
cephalopods, which, starting with the cigar-shaped 
orthoceratite, far back in the Silurian, culminate in 
the fairy-like "chambered nautilus," surely the most 
beautiful of shell-life forms. Indeed, does not 
every flower or beautiful bird illustrate the same 
truth — no utility, no mere life-preservation value, 
is sufficient to account for such loveliness — any 



EDUCATION IN TASTE ' 221 

more than utility can account for the loveHness of 
a sunset. It is nature herself bent upon the crea- 
tion of beauty, as her own sufficient end. 

And is this anywhere more wonderfully shown 
than in the creation and fostering of the love of 
beauty in human nature? Nature has created 
beauty, and she has created us with the love of 
beauty; this is one of the ultimate facts of the uni- 
verse; and I, for one, am heartily in sympathy with 
those philosophers who have found in this fact a 
reason for reverencing nature and in having faith 
that her revelation of beauty is of deep and material 
significance for us. It is nobly expressed by 
Longinus^ : 

Nature determined man to be no low or ignoble animal ; 
but introducing us into life and this entire universe as into 
some vast assemblage, to be spectators, in a sort, of her con- 
tests, and most ardent competitors therein, did then implant 
in our souls an invincible and eternal love of that which is 
great and, by our own standards, more divine. Therefore 
it is, that for the speculation and thought which are within 
the scope of human endeavor not all the universe together is 
sufficient, our conceptions often pass beyond the bounds which 
limit it ; and if one were to look upon life all round, and see 
how in all things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful, 
stand supreme, he will at once know for what ends we have 
been born. 

In the order of creation beauty is in nature be- 
fore it is in art. In the order of education love of 
beauty in art grows with love of beauty in nature. 
This is no argument for a shallow realism; for the 

^Prickard's translation.- 



222 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

true color of nature is deep and abiding and of the 
kinship of truth. But it is an argument for a cer- 
tain simple and frank reverence for the charm that 
the seeker will always find about him, in daily things 
— in flowers and bees and birds, in the turn of a 
child's cheek or the smile on its mother's lips, in the 
magic of the summer's green, the austerity of win- 
ter's snows, in the heroic deaths of men who love 
justice and temperance and truth. It is an argu- 
ment for a value that is at once elemental and 
supreme in human afifairs, which God has placed 
freely within the hands of all and made difficult only 
to those who will not seek it. In praise of the love 
of beauty I have quoted from great philosophers, 
sages of the historic world; but lest you think that 
to them only can be given this treasure which is 
above all treasures, I would quote at the last a 
prayer of the Navaho^ — dwellers in hogans, readers 
of no book save Nature's, but men who have read 
Nature's book even to her essential truth. 

In Tsegihi, 

In the house made of dawn, 

In the house made of evening twilight. 

In the house made of dark cloud, 

In the house made of rain and mist and pollen. 

Where the dark mist curtains the doorway 

The path to which is on the rainbow, 

Where the zigzag lightning stands high on top . . . 

Oh, male divinity ! 

'Abridged from the version published by Washington Mat- 
thews, "Navaho Legends," Memoirs of the American Folk- 
Lore Society, Vol. V. (1897). 



EDUCATION IN TASTE 223 

With your moccasins of dark cloud, come to us, 

With your leggings and shirt and head-dress of dark cloud, 

come to us, 
With your mind enveloped in dark cloud, come to us, 
With the dark thunder above you, come to us soaring. 
With the shapen cloud at your feet, come to us soaring, . . . 
With the far darkness made of the rain and the mist over 

your head, come to us soaring, 
With the zigzag lightning flung out on high over your head. 
With the rainbow hanging high over your head, come to us 

soaring, 
V/ith the far darkness made of the dark cloud on the ends of 

your wings, come to us soaring ! . . . 
Happily may fair white corn, to the ends of the earth, come 

with you, 
Happily may fair yellow corn, fair blue corn, fair corn of all 

kinds, goods of all kinds, jewels of all kinds, come with 

you . . . 
Happily the old men will regard you. 
Happily the old women will regard you. 
The young men and the young women will regard you. 
The children will regard you, 
The chiefs will regard you. 

Happily, as they approach their homes, they will regard you : 
May their roads home be on the trail of peace ! 
In beauty I walk, 
With beauty before me I walk. 
With beauty behind me I walk. 
With beauty above and about me I walk. 
It is finished in beauty, 
It is finished in beauty ! 



V 

EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY 

THREE PAPERS OF THE HOUR 



I 

THE FAILURE OF THE INTELLECTUALS 

THE outbreak of the war in 1914 was a triumph 
for miHtarism in European civiHzation: that 
all men know. But all men do not see with the 
same eyes what were the forces leading to interna- 
tionalism over which this militarism triumphed. It 
triumphed over the frail barriers of European di- 
plomacy and the weak fortifications of international 
law, symbolized by The Hague — but who expected 
these to hold against a will to power ? It triumphed 
over the economic bonds of industry and trade, 
whose symbol is banks and gold — but surely it is a 
fatuous estimate of the human soul which rests its 
hope for peace upon its love of gain. It triumphed 
over the communion of religion, symbolized by ec- 
clesiastical Rome — but when has the Church kept 
Christians from one another's throats? All these 
forces w^ere discounted by the wise — slender reeds 
of support! — but there were still two elements of 
cohesion upon which men less consciously, but more 
convincedly, relied for the preservation of the in- 
tegrity and sanity of the civilization of Europe, and 
it was the failure of these two that made the bit- 
terest disillusionments of the earlier hours of the 
war. 

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228 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

The first of these was the spirit of the Interna- 
tional Workingmen's Association. Labor has al- 
ways been the least articulate of the great forces in 
society ; but in recent years it had formulated a faith 
in the fraternal relationship of the inarticulate 
masses of all countries vividly enough to impress 
the world with its reality and strength. It was a 
prime article of this faith that the masses of the 
different nations would not (at the command of the 
classes) slay one another; and even while bourgeois 
and aristocrat ridiculed, a dim reliance was placed 
upon this profession. Nay, it is more than prob- 
able that a moving cause of the war was the de- 
termination of militaristic oligarchs to kill this pro- 
fession before it should have gained such conscious 
definition as to rob them of their power; in other 
words, the pacifism of the International and its so- 
cialistic offshoots was an actual cause of the war. 
The event shows that the militarists were too late, 
at least in Russia, to save themselves, although they 
were timely enough so far as ruining the world was 
concerned. Possibly the spirit of the International 
may yet assert itself redemptively — if first it gain 
articulation and discover within itself something of 
that generosity and nobility without which no faith 
can redeem. 

But if the spirit of the International was the least 
articulate, that of the intellectuals w^as the most 
articulate of the great professions of European cul- 
ture. It is the very business of art and science and 



EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY 229 

scholarship to express themselves, and to an inter- 
national audience and for an international under- 
standing; and there was no solidarity of Western 
civilization so pretentious as that of its intellectual- 
ism. When the leaders (for the intellectuals pro- 
claimed themselves leaders) of all the great nations 
were masters and pupils to one another, how could 
there be — so it was imagined — a disruption of so 
bonded a unity? So seated was the delusion that 
months after the war had bloodily blotted out all 
other interchanges, doctors and publicists were still 
sending manifestoes across frontiers, passing from 
justification to repudiation and finally recrimination 
and hatred, in the wordy battles that seemed sud- 
denly so remote from men's affairs. One of the 
very earliest of these manifestoes was the utterance 
of the ninety-three German professors sent out to 
neutrals; and it was also the most damning of all 
to the pretensions of intellectualism. 

For from the very first it was abundantly evident 
that the intellectuals — naturalists and historians 
and all — were merely the propagandists of a nar- 
row nationalism. The high communion of art and 
scholarship and the admirable edifice of science 
which were the creations of the concerted devotion 
of many lives in many lands, and which were sup- 
posed and indeed felt by their devotees to be the 
symbols of a spiritual unity and fellowship, sud- 
denly, under the strain of the partisan ambitions of 
a class whom the intellectuals thought themselves 



230 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

to hold in contempt, fell vacantly asunder — and in 
a moment the mind of Europe was shown to be 
hollow and void of all spiritual substance. 

In the hour of strenuous physical conflict the full 
significance of this collapse cannot be realized; but 
in the long run it will assuredly be found to be the 
most vital blow which the war has inflicted upon the 
modernism of the Western world. There was 
nothing so distinctive of this modernism as the 
achievement of its intellectuals; this was our pet 
and pride, the show baby of our civilization. We 
had come, too, to regard it as our salvation and as 
embodying the whole grace and illumination of 
life. To see a thing so idealized distorted to gro- 
tesque abuse, and what had been proclaimed the 
saviour of humanity made the slave of man's cor- 
ruption, this can end only in shock and revulsion 
and the gall of a bitter denial. It is therefore of 
high moment — lest we not utterly destroy in too 
greatly condemning — that we see the intellectual- 
istic idol in its unfurbished truth, that we may dis- 
cover its defects in season. 

For there is a desirable salvage. I never read 
the "Meditations" of Rene Descartes — who is with 
an especial right the master of the moderns — with- 
out a renewed reverence not only for a man of such 
simple and conscientious honesty, but also for the 
truth itself. And I find in his immediate succes- 
sors, in Spinoza the Jew, Locke the Englishman, 
Leibnitz the German, the continuation of that same 



EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY 231 

austere and inspiring truthfulness. But if — not 
led by the gradations of illusion to which surrender 
is so easy when one follows step by step — if a leap 
be made from the beginnings to the nineteenth cen- 
tury, how unspeakable is the descent! Philosophy 
becomes confused with its own cunning and de- 
luded with its own shows, and at the end we have 
such embodied bombast as Herbert Spencer and 
such theatric lying as Ernst Haeckel dominating 
economics and politics and religion with their bio- 
logical spells and materialistic incantations. Love 
of truth is lipped and praise of the spirit mouthed, 
but everywhere reason is made the apologist of 
prejudice and science the pander of appetite. 

Consider for a moment the dogmas and tenets of 
the intellectuals. Foremost is naturalism, every- 
where, in art and science and religion, fuming about 
realities and meaning sensation, and undertaking 
such monstrosities as the creation of a rational 
faith — an artificial religion! With this, and un- 
doubtedly as a conceit growing out of the invention 
of machines, is the conviction of human self-suffi- 
ciency: the dignity of man, the rights of man, the 
prowess of man, the idolatry of man — and of 
woman. The two, compounded under the blessed 
name ''evolution," unite into a fatuous dogma of 
progress, which is really only the fatalistic optimism 
of the irresponsible — like the chirping of crickets 
in Indian summer. That the Paradise of such a 
confession should be the materialistic bliss of fat 



232 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

meals and gaudy apparel, and that its ethics should 
resolve first into a consolation of vanity and thence 
into the cynical acceptance of the right of might is 
the sure effect of the drugging — as inevitable as 
the winter which ends the insect chorus. 

The truth is, modernism suffers from a horrible 
vivisection of the soul, and its paeans to the intellect 
have been but praise of its own deformity. A soul 
which consists of mere intellect, with faith and hope 
and charity sheared away, is as helpless as a pigeon 
without its cerebellum; all steersmanship is gone, 
and its ideas are but empty ghosts twittering in a 
vacuum, ready to rush in a huddle at the first sacri- 
fice offered, there to lap up the red blood. When 
in the modern world material enterprise set up the 
altars and, with capital jangling the castanets, pol- 
itics prepared the offering, all the ghosts of science, 
art, and theology flew to the rites — seeking an in- 
terest, seeking a purpose, seeking a confession which 
might give them life and substance. The church 
talked social service and became a promoter of so- 
cial clubs ; art talked devotion to beauty and became 
a purveyor to mean appetites; science posed as the 
physician of human nature and concocted smooth 
formularies justifying the iniquities of the strong. 
The upper classes everywhere sank back into a kind 
of mawkish paganism, of which the most disheart- 
ening symbol is modern "higher education," huck- 
stering off to capital the various brands of brains 
which it models to capital's use, and pointing with 



EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY 233 

a vapid piety to the pillared porticos which capital 
rears for it — as if, by restoring the sacred precincts, 
Olympian Zeus could be made to live again. 

It is small wonder that in this showy ritual labor 
has deemed itself to be the sacrifice — ''the goat," as 
we say. And it is small wonder — though thrice a 
pity — that, inarticulate and unled, it has made itself 
greedy of the unnatural feasts of politics and capi- 
tal. This was the ruin of the spirit of the Interna- 
tional — greed of economic goods; in our own coun- 
try it is the ''interest" of labor; in Russia it is max- 
imalism and the sottishness of self-lust. For the 
spectre which the Bolsheviki have raised is the 
proper Nemesis of our hypertrophied intellectual- 
ism : it is unreason and appetite incarnate answering 
reason and intellect discarnate. The man of the 
body politic has been deformed in all his organs and 
functions and his whole being is in revolt. 

The war is a dreadful purge, applied to a sufferer 
in a desperate strait. We trust that it will carry 
away many ill humors from the constitution of man- 
kind, but we know that at the best there must be a 
long period of anxious care before we can hope to 
see civilization restored and hale. In the broadest 
sense the problem of recovery is an educational one. 
A new ideal of human life will have to be discov- 
ered by those who see truest the meaning of the 
spiritual agony. A new schooling will have to be 
developed to enkindle in a fresh generation the light 
of this ideal. What is beyond lies on the knees of 



234 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

the gods. But of this much, at least, we may be 
sure : that the future will refuse to own any mere 
intellectualism, but will demand in its place (and 
we need not shun the word) a confessed spiritual- 
ism. The education of the future, in school and 
state, will instill with all its power that there can be 
no knowledge without responsibility, no realization 
of beauty without sympathy, no discovery of good- 
ness without idealism. There must be faith of 
men, not in other men for their attainment's sake, 
but in the visioned Man, for his unattainment's 
sake. 



II 

THE BALLOT 

THE ballot is the charter of democracy and the 
certificate of freedom of the democratic citi- 
zen. The voter, in the act of voting, proclaims 
that he is a civic man, with rights and responsibil- 
ities, a legislator, having a voice in the making of 
the laws by which he is governed. No matter how 
remote from the conduct of affairs his ordinary 
walk may be, for the moment he has entered into 
the halls of state, there to enact for the public des- 
tinies. The afflatus of the booth, I might call this 
high emotion, — but I would not speak mockingly 
of it, for it is just this emotion {in posse or in actu) 
which gives to the franchise its power to make men 
of citizens. 

There is, to be sure, much that is farcical in the 
actual business of voting. I recall well enough my 
first presidential ballot. A man with bulging eyes 
and a coarse mustache challenged my vote in a loud 
mechanical voice. I had never seen the man be- 
fore, and I became red and angry, for I felt that if 
he had been a gentleman he would have communi- 
cated his intentions to me beforehand, seeing that 
I was duly registered. However, he turned away 

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236 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

with a languid and remote indifference as I swore 
in my vote. Presently, a sharp-eyed chap from an- 
other angle challenged another voter, who turned 
out, from his confused answers, to be a butcher 
residing in a neighboring state — temporarily, he 
said. I noticed my challenger bristle up and insist 
on the butcher's voting, for he seemed to be in two 
minds about the matter. The fact is, it was a close 
ward, but the man with the bulging eyes and coarse 
mustache won out. 

That was in the days when voting was easy : an 
eagle or a rooster surmounting a circle for the vot- 
er's cross made the straight ballot plain for all and 
inevitable for the ignorant, and vastly simplified 
the party machinery. Since that day I have voted 
a variety of ballots safeguarded from the ignorant 
and hopelessly puzzling to the intelligent. Indeed, 
I have often shivered at the mere thought of the 
wasted paper as the great blanket sheets were 
handed out to me. Then to the booth, and I try to 
catch in my mind some vague clue that will identify 
for good or ill a few in so great a sea of names. 
There are various principles of selection open to 
the voter, after the first few known and deliberate 
choices have been recorded. There are cards with 
portraits of the candidates which have been handed 
you as you entered, and with which the booth is lit- 
tered; and one can judge something from physiog- 
nomy. There is the bruit of a name: you have 
heard a man roundly abused, and you are sure there 



EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY 237 

must be something in him, good or ill (and candi- 
dates assure me that an ill fame is better than 
none). Indeed, there is the form of the name it- 
self, frequently indicative. I once lived in a town 
ruled by alien-born citizens, and I made it a princi- 
ple, after voting such names as appeared to be of 
American origin, to vote the Irish if the French 
happened to be the majority of the hour and the 
French if the Irish were in. Of course it was fu- 
tile; and in my later life I have adopted the simple 
rule of voting only for those candidates about whom 
I happen to have acquired some knowledge. 

A few of my acquaintances (''highbrows" mostly) 
never vote; or, if they do, they are ashamed to ac- 
knowledge it. It is not difficult to read their minds 
— about what must have been in the minds of the 
white representatives in a freedmen legislature of 
the Carolina reconstruction. *'Law-makers," they 
say to themselves, "judges of the public policy, sov- 
ereign discoverers of the good!" . . . and they 
lift their eyebrows and shrug helplessly. It is an 
intelligible attitude, and it is without vanity; 
indeed, it is reasonable if one believe that there are 
better and worse citizens, and that those are better 
who are best tutored in the broad affairs of men. 
But it is an attitude that gets all that makes it rea- 
sonable from the fantastical forms which the ballot 
assumes; not from what the ballot should be, or is 
in principle. 

For it is the ballot— let me repeat — that is to the 



238 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

citizen the certificate of his rights and the token of 
his responsibihties as a civic man; and these are 
things too precious to mankind ever to be allowed 
to suffer diminution. Rather, they should be en- 
larged and intensified and broadened in the con- 
sciousness of every citizen, male and female; for 
rights and responsibilities are the friends of the 
state and the true wardens of freedom. But this 
is not to say that our democracy has perfected the 
use of the ballot; or, indeed, that the public has yet 
attained to a clear-eyed perception of the kind of 
choices it can effectively determine. 

The principle of the sound ballot is implicitly 
present in the attitude of my "highbrow" friends. 
They justly feel that in a society having such com- 
plex needs as our own and provided with such deli- 
cate economic and moral instruments for the satis- 
faction of those needs public policies should be de- 
termined and public works administered by the 
most highly trained and scientific intelligence society 
possesses. They feel that the statesman should be 
a man schooled in the history of statesmanship and 
conversant with the possibilities of human nature; 
that the directors of commerce should be econo- 
mists, the controllers of industrial enterprise should 
be engineers, the officers of sanitation physicians, 
and that everywhere in society the spirit of science 
should govern the execution of public affairs. If 
modern intellectualism be not utterly an illusion, if 
it have any value for mankind, the definition and 



EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY 239 

satisfaction of the public will — in our age-long 
search after the good — must surely be its mission. 

Obviously such matters should not be left to the 
hazard of the polls. They are tasks of the intellect, 
and of intellect very highly trained, and they should 
be left to the judgment of trained intelligences. 
The "highbrow," if he be an engineer or a physician 
or a lawyer and competent in his profession, is as 
a matter of fact a more capable judge and deserving 
of a more telling voice in all matters where mechan- 
ics or medicine or law may be made ministers of 
the public good. Party cries and platforms and 
campaign arguments are but dreary fustian to men 
who understand both their own powers and their 
own limitations, as most scientifically trained men 
do. It is only to the untrained commoner that they 
appeal, for the untrained man deems himself to be 
a judge in all things — and most a judge in public 
affairs. Clearly he is not so, and clearly he ought 
not to wield a ballot that makes him appear so, 
either to himself or to others. 

What then is the true function of the ballot, and 
the principle of a valid suffrage? Put yourself in 
the polling booth and ask after the principle gov- 
erning the choices of which you are least ashamed 
and I think the answer will be before you. For it 
is in your choice of men, men of whom through 
some contact of personality or idea you know the 
character, that you have best served the state. Your 
knowledge of policies, your sense of interest, have 



240 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

influenced your choice to an extent, but fundament- 
ally your choice is based upon the feeling that here 
is a man who may be trusted to preserve the integ- 
rity of the state because of his own integrity. Your 
ballot is a judgment of the candidate's character; 
and this is exactly what it should be, for this is the 
one thing that you are qualified, as a voter, to pass 
upon. 

It is, in fact, the qualification that justifies uni- 
versal suffrage. Human nature is complex and 
many-faceted. You and your fellow citizens are 
showing yourselves to one another constantly, and 
in a multitude of lights and to multitudes of per- 
sons. Not any one of them is a perfect judge of 
you, nor you of any one of them. But if a man be 
put up for public judgment, as a candidate is, then 
his true valuation is pretty certain to be expressed, 
— not, heaven knows, by the vote he may receive 
per accidens, but by the group of ballots cast by 
those who know him in some personal fashion. It 
may have been but a glimpse of his face, a gesture 
(I could never vote for the man with the bulging 
eyes and coarse mustache) it may have been a 
trifling transaction; it may have been but a public 
utterance or. a portrait; but we human beings are 
always and instinctively reading men's characters 
in their faces and in their demeanors as well as in 
their deeds ; it is the one school in which we are all 
trained ; and the determination of character through 
a many- voiced judgment, expressing a multitude of 



EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY 241 

impressions, is the true justification of a wide suf- 
frage. A candidate who is judged not only by his 
business partners and club associates, by his fellow 
church members and his underling clerks, but also 
by his physician, by the Greek who shines his shoes, 
by the driver who meets his car on the road, indeed, 
by his wife, and the ladies he encounters at recep- 
tions, — such a candidate will be well judged; and 
he is likely to represent truly the ideal of probity 
which his community owns. 

The fact is that even with our present bunglesome 
ballot most choices are made on this basis, — from 
the presidency down. It is the fact of personality 
that determines political manoeuvering, — plastering 
our walls with portraits, giving car-end orations, 
and cinemas of the great man's gestures to au- 
diences that care not a whit for his words. If mere 
reason were to be our judge of fitness all candidates 
would be men of the closet, preparing their briefs 
for the public press that they might be meditated at 
leisure. But oratory is, and ever will be, the 
strongest force which a candidate can bring to large 
groups of voters, not primarily because of the ora- 
tor's skill, but because the forms of his expression 
are revelations of his character. Party platforms 
— why, the very word "platform'' proclaims them 
to be (what political cynics love to point) but de- 
vices for making the rostrum effective, — give the 
candidate themes upon which to try his skill and 
show his zeal ; but everybody knows that his actions. 



242 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

as an officer, will be determined by the public ex- 
igency, not by the plausibility of pre-election 
forensic. 

But if such is the valid principle of suffrage, and 
if the proper exercise of the ballot is the choice of 
representative men, how is its proper working to be 
attained? — for our present methods miss the point 
woefully. To my mind there is a simple program 
leading toward this desirable end. The number of 
elections ought not to be diminished; the number 
of voters ought to be extended — at least, to include 
the women. But the number of elective offices 
should certainly be diminished, so that no officer 
should be chosen by ballot for a post calling for tech- 
nical qualification or one in any sense narrowly ad- 
ministrative ; such offices should be filled by appoint- 
ment or through commissioners qualified to elect. 
Further the terms of office, for commissioners and 
administrators and perhaps for legislators, should 
be greatly extended; for rapid rotation of officers 
is only a confession of political helplessness. 
Through such devices the short ballot could be se- 
cured — ballots so short that at each election every 
citizen would have a full opportunity to acquire 
some direct knowledge of all the candidates; and 
thus insure genuine electoral judgments. Of 
course, mistakes would be made — the politician hath 
an art that may deceive even the many ; but for this 
the recall is the proper remedy. The recall is justi- 
fied by the same arguments that justify 'the ballot, 



EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY 243 

and it fortifies the strength and meaning of the bal- 
lot. Initiative and referendum, it may be re- 
marked, which are so often hitched up with the re- 
call, are condemned by this same argument : they 
stand for public choice where the public is not qual- 
ified, in the field of ideas and executive politics, not 
in the choice of the good man. 

Of course, there is one policy which the public 
must decide, and to the right decision of which all 
democratic training should be directed. This is the 
ideal of the good life, in society. The adminis- 
trators of public affairs should be the intellectuals 
— the experts, who best know how to secure results. 
But the legislators, in a final sense, must always be 
men who are judges of the social good, and that 
means men who are themselves good, — for "the 
good man is the measure of everything," as Aris- 
totle wisely said. But how else, save through elec- 
toral selection, is the good man to be found? In- 
deed, one may truly say that the whole art of demo- 
cratic government is the pragmatic definition of the 
good through the choice of representative men. 
None of these men — not a Washington, not a Lin- 
coln, — will be perfect, or be the embodiment of the 
perfect citizen ; but the perfect citizen will gradually 
be defined to all citizens — as the ideal American is 
now partially defined by Washington and Lincoln 
— through this process of selection. And to what 
other end does a state exist? 



Ill 

PRO FIDE 

A MAN'S political education should never be 
completed. It was more than mere antique 
sentiment, it was the wisdom of the truest sage, that 
led Solon, when he described to Croesus the happiest 
of men, to make his hero — after he had lived a vir- 
tuous life, reared a family, and enjoyed an honor- 
able share of what men call goods — end his career 
and fulfill his happiness by death in battle for his 
country. Perfect citizenship is a thing not easily 
to be attained; while a man lives he must fight for 
it (most of all with his own anarchic soul), and 
death must overtake him fighting for it; and not 
until he has fallen can his fortune be accounted and 
the final credit set to his estate. 

In a certain broad and true sense the bestowal of 
the ballot is a recognition of this fact. The ballot 
is very properly called a weapon and an election a 
battle; in the possession of the ballot there is a de- 
fensive safety, and in the exercise of the vote a 
military responsibility demanding an alert mind and 
an eye unwaveringly set on the good of the state. 
The ballot is not a security that can be put in a 
safety deposit and draw comfortable interest; its 

245 



246 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

employment is its preservation. This means that 
he to whom it is committed must be relentlessly in 
training, learning through use the better mastery 
of his citizen's rights and, like a surgeon or a sol- 
dier or a man of law, improving his skill with prac- 
tice — which can only signify practice of civic judg- 
ment in that study of human nature and choice of 
good men which is the true life of a democracy. 
Such a process is necessarily educational, and it is 
the great virtue of democracy that it recognizes no 
finished men — your perfect valet, for example, or 
hussar, or beau — and no classes save citizens, active 
or preparing; and both of these are in process of 
education. 

Of course, there is a distinction between the boy 
at school and the man at the booth. The latter is 
doing what the former is preparing for, even though 
we own that the preparation must continue with the 
practice. And certainly it makes a huge difference 
in the voter if the boy has been properly trained. 
For there are principles which underlie the educa- 
tion of democrats in their school days, just as there 
are principles governing the school training of those 
who are to become docile subjects of an autocracy. 
Next to the goose-step (which is but its automatic 
display), the docility of the German, schoolboy and 
subject, has come in for our most copious contempt; 
but as a matter of fact, this docility is merely law- 
abidingness, which among ourselves we surely re- 
gard as a virtue; and if we were to analyze our an- 



EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY 247 

tipathy, it would be found to lie not against a spirit 
of obedience to law, but against a spirit willing to 
accept laws which it has had no part in making; in 
brief, we are angry with the Germans because they 
are not democrats. Obviously (and this is what 
we hold against the German schoolboy), it has been 
the design of German education to train anti-demo- 
cratic citizens — primarily, I suspect, by impressing 
upon the youth that admiration for loyalty, that 
hero-worship and fidelity to the kingly, which ap- 
peals so warmly to the youthful temperament. 
Their success in this design irks us, and the more 
because we have so widely and uncritically copied 
German educational methods and ideals when we 
should have been creating a schooling appropriate 
for a democracy. 

The key to democratic education, like the key to 
democratic institutions, is liberalism. Along with 
the freeman's ballot, the free public school is the 
great fortress of democracy. But the school must 
be not merely free of access, it must be free in 
spirit; that is, it must stand for a liberal education. 
This means, first of all, that it must avoid early 
specialization. In Germany there is one type of 
public school for the child of peasant or laborer; 
there are other types for merchants, soldiers, legis- 
lators: the whole system is based upon the hypoth- 
esis that the state must be a class-state, each man 
born to his appropriate moves and from infancy 
assigned to his possible squares, like the pawns and 



248 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

pieces of the chess-board. America has escaped 
this, luckily, for its primary schools; but overhead 
we have been assiduously copying the Germans, and 
the superstructure is weighing more and more heav- 
ily upon the common-school foundations, tending 
constantly to contract their native liberalism. Un- 
doubtedly, for that kind of efficiency which sees all 
ends from the beginning, the German method is 
best; but no free state can afford to foresee its des- 
tinies — except the one destiny of holding open the 
possibility of choice. 

Liberalism means, then, primarily the training of 
youth to choose their own careers; which, in turn, 
should mean a belated entrance upon a career. For 
it is not to be supposed that this choice is to be made 
intelligent by an early smattering in many subjects 
and arts; such a notion springs from the fallacious 
confusion of means with ends, and it is only knowl- 
edge of ends that can make choice intelligent. Such 
knowledge cannot be acquired from anything short 
of a comprehension of the history and organization 
of society in connection with a fair internal estimate 
of the nature and possibilities of man. That is, it 
is knowledge that is possible only with a certain 
maturity — as much, at least, as is required of the 
voter; and it should be the aim of a democracy, in 
the interests of its own perfection, to keep its youth 
in the tutelage of liberal studies up to their major- 
ities. The expense of such a schooling would of 
course be great; but its returns (granting wisdom in 



EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY 249 

the process) would be inestimable. Further, if we 
look upon the schools, as we should look upon them, 
not as eleemosynary burdens, but as part of the re- 
turns which society gives its citizens, v/e should find 
in the richness of their life our reward. In no in- 
stitution is the faith of a people so honestly shown 
as in its schools ; what a generation of men is will- 
ing to teach to its children is the fairest measure of 
what it really believes in; and if democracy is a part 
of our vital faith, then by every means at our dis- 
posal our children will be trained for its preserva- 
tion, which can only be through their comprehen- 
sion of it. 

The creation of such a comprehension should be 
the guiding principle of our public-school organiza- 
tion. Not variety of skilled technicians, but hu- 
manistic breadth of mind, is the true token of the 
liberal state. The two things are not incompatible, 
but they do not necessarily coexist, and it is easy to 
sacrifice the second to the cheaper production of the 
first (as Germany shows, and as we, alas! are in 
peril of showing) . We must face the fact that de- 
mocracy is dearly bought and dearly maintained, 
and that its liberalism is a kind of delicate oscilla- 
tion of the soul which can be preserved from fatal 
overthrow only by an eternal gymnastic, for which 
no training is too precious. 

If we ask what should be the form of this train- 
ing, how our schools can be made liberators of the 
spirit, fosterers of democratic citizenship, we need 



250 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

not go, for our programme, beyond what is already 
stated. For we have said that the youth of the land 
are to be educated to become choosers of their own 
careers, and this means choosers of the whole life 
that they are to live, private and public: they are 
to be taught statesmanship in that final sense in 
which the statesman is the discoverer of the good 
of which human nature is capable. Each genera- 
tion of men must make of its heirs a generation of 
discoverers of the good (not easeful spendthrifts 
of their fathers' fortunes) : so only may men remain 
noble. 

As sought concretely, this object is not beyond 
attainment. Man is by nature limited. He is an 
animal with simple appetites and few senses, whose 
satisfactions are the chore of our technical skills — 
engineerings, medicinings, purveyings. He is also 
a spirit, limited in his spiritual nature : for there are 
just three forms of the good, in a final sense, of 
which he has inner apprehension, and these are the 
goodness, truth, the goodness of beauty, and the 
goodness of virtue or nobility of character. Edu- 
cators should be thinking of these forms of the 
good, to which studies are the means, when they 
seek to liberate the soul of youth; and in the light 
thereof, surely they could simplify their scholastic 
machinery. For we are constantly losing the end 
of education in our absorption with its means, for- 
getting that all that is harmonious and beautiful in 
hum.an progress (art and science and statecraft 



EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY 251 

alike) comes from the supple and simple adaptation 
of means to ends conceded to be good — from the 
law of parsimony, which is the key to all honest dis- 
cipline. Or, briefly, what can compare with mathe- 
matics as giving inevitably a perception of truth 
and error? What betters our imaginations of 
beauty more than beautiful poetry or noble prose? 
What criticism of the virtues of one's own soul is 
more capable than is admiration for the ideal man 
as the history of human deeds and of men's utmost 
desires has portrayed him ? The means to all these 
are as free as the art of printing — plus the little 
sacrifice of time which we should give for our de- 
mocracy's sake. 

So giving, with a rounded understanding of the 
meaning of liberalism, we may escape falling into 
the fallacy of the past three centuries of European 
civilization, which have cultivated the technical in- 
telligence of man at the cost of the liberal and spir- 
itual, and have brought us to the dread pass of to- 
day. Rather, thinking of truth and beauty and no- 
bility, we should be ever portraying — since these 
are the essence of our humanity — the form and fea- 
tures of the ideal citizen, the hero and king of a 
democratic society. 

For the Germans are not wrong in holding before 
the eyes of their youth the image of a heroic Ger- 
man and bidding them be loyal to him. All great 
nations have been built up in character and soul by 
the images of heroes — such a one as Achilles or 



252 LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

Roland or Arthur or Siegfried. Our distaste for 
German schooling should not be that it makes idols 
of its heroes, but that it confuses unheroic prince- 
lings with the heroic — the Crown Prince medalled 
as Siegfried is an example. Democracy, too, must 
have its hero — perhaps a composite of its noblest, 
as we Americans make a kind of composite ideal of 
Washington and Lincoln. All liberal education 
should be directed to the delineation of such a na- 
tional hero, whose portrait, in the nature of things, 
could never be completed; it would grow in stateli- 
ness with each new achievement of the humane 
spirit and with each renewed participation in its 
character. Liberal culture, indeed, can only mean 
that this character of the ideal citizen is in some de- 
gree manifested in all citizens; and the true mean- 
ing of equality in society is but the common possi- 
bility of men to share in such salvation. 

If we would seek example, we need only turn to 
the greatest of all democratic movements in human 
history. For the living heart of Christianity is 
that simple faith in the redeemableness of the com- 
mon man which Jesus made the prime article of its 
faith. In a direct and unavoidable sense the soul 
of all that is Christian in Christendom is the Imago 
Christi. Through this image an ecclesia of the 
spirit has been created which, with all defects, is 
still the noblest of human gains. It is an image of 
faith, faith in an ideal character gifted with per- 
ception of the ideal good; and upon faith of no 



EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY 253 

Other type can any true democracy grow or be made 
secure. For in a political as in the ecclesiastical 
democracy the fight is never ended while life lasts, 
and only unto the departed can the final credit be 
set to their estate. 



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